Around 8% of the 31.1 million evaluations submitted to Tripadvisor in 2024 have been pretend, in line with the corporate’s “Transparency Report 2025.”
That’s greater than two times the quantity detected in 2022, in line with corporate stories.
But that does not imply the collection of pretend evaluations at the website doubled, stated Becky Foley, vp and head of consider and protection at Tripadvisor.
While submissions to the web page larger, Tripadvisor’s insurance policies on pretend evaluations additionally modified, she stated, bringing up the corporate’s extra competitive stance towards “incentivized reviews.” These happen when corporations be offering consumers reductions or freebies in trade for evaluations, or supply incentives to staff whose names are discussed in evaluations.
“The employees get their mom, best friend or cousin to submit reviews, mentioning their names,” she stated. “It ends up leading to businesses having reviews that aren’t actually valuable to our community.”
What is a pretend evaluation?
According to Tripadvisor, it’s “any review submitted by someone who is knowingly submitting biased or non-firsthand content, in an effort to manipulate a property’s reputation.”
But there is a larger explanation why detections are on the upward thrust, she stated.
“Our system is always getting better,” she stated, bringing up Tripadvisor’s three-pronged procedure that depends on auto-detection, human evaluation and neighborhood comments.
Some 7% of submissions in 2024 have been auto-rejected prior to being posted, the file stated. Auto-detections additionally flagged some other 5% of submissions for human evaluation.
However, Tripadvisor’s consider and protection staff in the long run moderated greater than 4.2 million evaluations, amounting to greater than 13% of all submissions in 2024, in line with the file.
Another 244,000 evaluations have been disputed by way of individuals on the 1/3 degree of evaluation, the file confirmed. Of those, some 72% remained at the website, and 28% have been got rid of, it stated.
How to identify a pretend
Tripadvisor has 4 classes of faux submissions: boosting, vandalism, member fraud and paid evaluations, Foley stated.
There’s a false impression that vandalism accounts for many pretend evaluations, Foley stated, including that boosting (54%) and member fraud (39%) have lengthy made up the majority of the ones evaluations.
Paid evaluations (4.8%) are a smaller, however “more pernicious,” class of fakes, she stated.
This comprises “review farms,” she stated, including that those individuals are steadily concerned with different kinds of on-line fraud too.
Most paid evaluations originate in Asia, Foley stated, even supposing best 17% of actual submissions come from the continent.
In 2024, greater than one-third of all paid submissions detected by way of Tripadvisor got here from Indonesia and Vietnam, whilst in 2022 maximum paid evaluations got here from India, the corporate stated.
A ‘cat and mouse’ recreation
Rooting out pretend evaluations is a continuing “cat and mouse” recreation, Foley stated. But Tripadvisor is getting higher at detecting them yearly, she stated.
“We are the first to admit that we’re never going to reach absolute perfection,” stated Foley. “We might not catch [a fake] the first time, but we’ll catch it eventually.”
Tripadvisor makes use of its personal generation, advanced over 25 years, to flush out fakes — a device that increasingly more is predicated much less on what a evaluation says, and extra on how it is posted, she stated. The corporate makes use of synthetic intelligence and behavioral biometrics to seek out patterns, which will hit upon abnormalities like submission spikes and IP deal with covering makes an attempt.
To catch paid reviewers, Tripadvisor investigators pose as pretend evaluation agents, Foley stated. When a nasty actor posts their first paid evaluation, “we have all of the data … hundreds of data points associated with it,” which the corporate makes use of to construct patterns to spot different evaluations submitted by way of the writer up to now.
Violators are not pulled off the website, however their scores are penalized for a 12 months, Foley stated. Repeat offenders obtain a pink badge on their checklist “that says this property is trying to deceive you,” she stated.
AI evaluations: no longer pretend, however no longer allowed
Most evaluations written by way of AI aren’t pretend, Foley stated, calling that “one of the myths I love to bust.”
“‘It’s somebody that’s trying to use AI, because they’d like their writing to be more polished,” she stated.
Still, the corporate does not permit them — a minimum of no longer for now.
In 2024, Tripadvisor got rid of greater than 200,000 evaluations that it suspected have been written by way of AI, in line with the corporate’s 2025 transparency file.
“We will continue to monitor the trends and patterns. But right now, we just don’t want travelers to come to TripAdvisor for a sea of sameness.”