The Italian Competition Authority has announced the launch of an investigation into Trustpilot Group plc, Trustpilot A/S, and Trustpilot S.r.l., companies that manage the well-known online platform dedicated to collecting and publishing consumer reviews about businesses and services. At the core of the inquiry is the system through which Trustpilot organizes and displays reviews and company ratings, which may be insufficiently transparent and potentially misleading to consumers.
Trustpilot is an online platform that allows consumers to share opinions and ratings about their experiences with businesses, as well as to consult reviews published by other users. Currently, the platform hosts profiles of over 1.27 million companies worldwide, organized by product and service categories. Businesses can access the service either for free or through paid packages that offer advanced features. Within each category, companies are automatically ranked according to a “relevance” criterion, based on the so-called TrustScore — a weighted average of consumer ratings (on a scale from 1 to 5) — and the total number of reviews received.
Although Trustpilot claims that its ranking criteria are designed to ensure that “the best companies are those that actively promote trust and transparency,” the Authority found that consumers do not receive clear and comprehensive information about how the platform operates and the rules determining ranking positions.
The AGCM also highlighted that, despite Trustpilot promoting automated review collection tools as solutions to reduce fake or misleading content, these tools actually allow companies to select which customers to invite to leave reviews. This could significantly distort the overall representation of received ratings. Furthermore, reviews collected through these systems are automatically labeled as “verified,” even without objective evidence proving that the reviewer has actually made a purchase.
According to some reports, Trustpilot’s checks on the authenticity of reviews are insufficient, to the extent that the platform features opinions from users who do not appear to be customers of the reviewed companies. The Antitrust identified several transparency issues in the information provided to consumers, including:
- unclear indications about the presence of paid services for companies that can affect the TrustScore, ranking visibility, and the “Verified” label;
- fragmented and hard-to-access information regarding how the TrustScore is calculated and the use of artificial intelligence to respond to reviews;
- lack of clear explanations about the real meaning of the “verified review” label, which an average consumer might interpret as a guarantee of authenticity.
According to the AGCM, these practices may constitute unfair commercial practices under Articles 20, 21, 22, and 23 of the Italian Consumer Code, as they are likely to mislead consumers about the actual reliability of the reviewed companies and the satisfaction level of their products or services. Specifically, the way Trustpilot presents its services may give the impression that reviews are impartial and genuine, whereas the use of automated tools to select review invitees, combined with insufficient checks on the reviewers’ actual experience, can significantly influence the TrustScore and company rankings, thus undermining the system’s transparency and altering consumers’ purchasing decisions.
