Trustpilot for businesses: the rules, the flagging tool and the score

Start with the rules

Trustpilot removes a review only when it breaks a published rule. Our rule-by-rule guide to Trustpilot's guidelines has one page for each, with the rule quoted, the evidence that supports a flag and examples.

The five reasons a business can flag:

• Harmful or illegal content: hate speech, threats, obscenity and defamation. The only reason that hides a review during assessment.
• Another person's personal information: names, numbers, emails and photos of people other than the reviewer.
• Advertising or promotional content: promo codes, links, spam and medicinal claims.
• Reviews not based on a genuine experience: employees, competitors, paid writers and other people's stories.
• Reviews about a different business: the wrong company or the wrong domain.

The rules around the flag:

• Who is allowed to write a review, and why a purchase is not required.
• The ban on incentivized reviews, including refunds tied to edits.
• How Trustpilot defines and punishes fake reviews.
• The fair-invitation rule.
• What counts as misuse of the flagging tool.
• What a business may say in a reply.

If you read one guide first, read what Trustpilot will and will not remove. It puts both lists side by side.

Flagging: reasons, evidence and outcomes

A flag is a claim that a review breaks one rule. Trustpilot assesses the words you highlight, for the reason you chose, and the flag cannot be edited afterwards.

• What decides the outcome in each flagging category explains why nobody can quote a success rate, and what Trustpilot does publish.
• How to document a review before you flag it has a case log format and the evidence that fits each reason.
• Why reviews disappear from a Trustpilot profile covers the six causes, including automated detection and deletion by the author.
• How long Trustpilot takes to decide a flag, and why nobody can quote a number of days.

Misuse, warnings and scams

Trustpilot watches how a business flags, not only what it flags. This is the part of the platform that can cost a brand its score.

• The four flagging patterns Trustpilot calls misuse, how it detects them, and the ladder of penalties.
• What a Consumer Warning does to a profile, and how recovery works. It hides the TrustScore, usually for 6 months.
• Ten signs of a review removal scam. A vendor's methods land on your record.

Fake reviews and attacks

• How many fake reviews Trustpilot finds, and how to report one.
• What to do in the first week of a review-bombing wave, and why mass-flagging makes it worse.
• What happens to a business that buys Trustpilot reviews.
• What to do when a competitor is behind the fake reviews: the rule to name, the evidence, and what not to do.
• How to spot fake reviews: the signs the FTC and the platforms describe, and why no single sign proves one.

TrustScore

• How TrustScore is calculated: time span, frequency and the 7 neutral reviews.
• Where a TrustScore starts to affect sales, and the half-star steps at 3.8, 4.3 and 4.8.
• Why a TrustScore drops when the star average looks unchanged.

Invitations and labels

Invitations decide who is heard on a profile. They also close one flagging route: a business cannot flag an invited customer's review as not genuine.

• What each review label means for flagging and for the score: Verified, Invited, Redirected and unprompted.
• Invitation wording and timing that Trustpilot allows.
• How to get more Trustpilot reviews without breaking a rule, and the trade-off an invitation carries.

Your profile

• Whether a business can delete its Trustpilot profile. It cannot, and an unclaimed profile is worse than a claimed one.
• Is Trustpilot legit? How it checks reviews, what it publishes, and the parts a business finds unfair.
• What a Trustpilot business account gets you, free and paid, and what paying does not buy.
• Trustpilot pricing: the published plans, the per-domain and annual-contract caveats, and what the free plan covers.
• Trustpilot widgets: which TrustBox each plan gets, and why filtering one by star rating is a risk.
• Trustpilot alternatives: what REVIEWS.io and Yotpo publish about themselves, with no ranking.
• REVIEWS.io vs Trustpilot: plans, prices and review rules side by side, from each company's own pages.
• The Trustpilot API: which APIs exist, what they need, and what no API can do to a review.
• Trustpilot on Shopify: the app, the plan each feature needs, and the invitation rules that still apply.
• How to reply to a 1-star Trustpilot review, with four templates and the health-brand caution.

We keep this hub current

Trustpilot revises its guidelines and help pages often. Each page here shows the date it was last checked against Trustpilot's documents, and each links to the primary source for every rule it states. Our methodology page explains how sources are held and tested.

For the service that applies these rules, see the main Trustpilot review removal page. Google's rules are a separate set, and our Google reviews hub covers them. To test one review against the five reasons, use the qualification tool.