Ranqa

Ranqa Research

Which review platforms will remove a negative review?

Every major review platform says it does not delete criticism. The interesting question is narrower: on what stated grounds can a review come down, who decides, does it stay visible while disputed, and what can a paying business actually control? This is what each platform's own published policy says — with a link to the page it says it on.

Published
2026-08-13
Policies observed
2026-08-13
Platforms
12

Summary

Read the tags as shorthand for the detail beneath them, not as a verdict. Several important distinctions do not survive compression — the notes matter.

Which review platforms will remove a negative review?
PlatformRemoves genuine negatives on request?Paid control over visibilityVisible while disputed?Reviewer verificationIncentivised reviews
RanqaThis is usNoA genuine negative review is not removed on request, at any price.NoneNo paid tier affects visibility, ordering or removal.YesNo account requiredLowers the barrier to honest feedback; it also means we carry more moderation load than an invite-only platform.Allowed if rating-neutralMerchants may reward reviewers only where the reward is identical regardless of the star rating.
TrustpilotNo“we don’t remove reviews just because a business thinks they are unfair or critical”ContestedTrustpilot states paid services make no difference. Italy’s AGCM found otherwise in March 2026 — see the detail below.YesPolicy changed in December 2020; potentially harmful or illegal content is excepted.Account requiredPurchase verification is not universal.Banned outright
GoogleBusiness ProfileNo“Do not report a review just because you disagree with it.” Only policy violations are eligible.None identifiedWe found no Google product affecting Business Profile review visibility — but also no page where Google states this.Not statedNot statedBannedExplicitly includes incentives offered for the removal of a negative review.
YelpNot published hereYelp’s help pages are disallowed to automated readers. We publish only what we could actually read.None“No employee at Yelp has the ability to override the decisions that the software makes.”Not published hereNot published hereNot published hereYelp does post public Compensated Activity Alerts — 120 of them in 2024.
Sitejabbernow SmartCustomerNo“under no circumstances can businesses pay to remove or suppress reviews”NonePaid plans give “more ways to collect and publish real reviews – but they can’t ever pay to remove or hide reviews”.Not statedProof of purchaseRequired from all reviewers since February 2026.Split policyBusiness reviews: banned. Product reviews: allowed only if disclosed and not tied to sentiment or star rating.
REVIEWS.ioNo“no genuine, verified and factually-correct review will ever be deleted”Timing controlA documented 14-day grace period before critical reviews auto-publish; auto-publish rules are configurable. REVIEWS.io frames this as resolving issues “without hiding legitimate feedback”.Not statedBadge, not a gateVerified Buyer badge via invitation; open reviews accepted but visually differentiated.Allowed, taggedA mandatory “Incentivized” tag; incentives must be for submitting a review, not for a favourable one.
ProvenExpertNo“Grundsätzlich löschen wir keine Kundenbewertungen.”Plan-gated appealThe arbitration procedure for suspected fake reviews is stated to be available to BASIC, PLUS or PREMIUM plans.Not statedNot statedNot stated
eKomiPartlyInadmissible content may be removed or obscured — replaced with asterisks — while the star rating is retained.Not statedAssessed before publishingVerifiable experienceRequires “a verifiable experience with the provider”.Not stated
TrustindexWidget-level onlyNot on the source platform. The distinction is essential — see the detail below.Rating filterWebsite widgets can be configured to display only chosen star ratings.Leaves the widgetReviews marked as spam disappear from widgets pending verification; reversible.Not specifiedNot addressedThe guidelines instead encourage businesses to solicit positive reviews.
HolidayCheckNo“Die bloße Behauptung eines Hoteliers, eine Bewertung enthalte Unwahrheiten, verpflichtet HolidayCheck nicht zu weiteren Prüfungen.”Not statedPartlyThe disputed factual claim is temporarily removed, then republished if no clear legal violation is found.Proof of stay“Verifizierter Aufenthalt” for HolidayCheck bookings; others must supply proof afterwards.Not stated
TripadvisorNoOnly for guideline violation or review fraud.None“We never have and will never give our advertisers or anyone else preferential treatment when we moderate reviews.”Not statedNot verifiedProhibitedIn 2024 around 9,000 businesses were warned and 360,000 reviews removed over employee incentive schemes.
FeefoNoThe flag “is not intended to be used to simply remove reviews”, and a negative review not in violation “will not be removed”.Not statedNo“By flagging a review for moderation, it will be removed from public view” while the process runs.Invite-onlyBusinesses must supply an unbiased data set, not one selected for benefit.Allowed, labelledMust be clearly labelled to disclose the nature of the incentive; prize draws and charity donations exempt.
  • Favours the reader
  • Conditional or contested
  • Favours the business
  • No first-party source found

Quotations are reproduced verbatim in their original language and are not translated. A translated quote is no longer a quote.

The distinctions that matter

Five rows above compress badly. Compressing them is how this topic usually gets reported wrong.

Trustindex

Trustindex publishes a "Rating filter" that lets a business show only chosen star ratings in its website widget, and a "Hide" function that removes a review from that widget. This is real, and Trustindex documents it openly. The qualifier is not optional: Trustindex states explicitly that these settings change nothing on the source platform — the review remains publicly visible on Google, Facebook or wherever it was left. It is control over what a business displays on its own site, not over the public record.

Trustpilot

Trustpilot's published guideline states that the same fair treatment applies regardless of whether a business uses its paid services. On 23 March 2026 Italy's AGCM issued a €4,000,000 penalty in case PS12962, finding among other things that paid services allowed businesses to select which consumers received an invitation to review. These are not the same claim: Trustpilot's statement concerns the treatment of reviews once posted; AGCM's finding concerns who is invited to post. We report both and merge neither. We have not verified whether the decision is under appeal.

Sitejabber / SmartCustomer

The FTC's November 2024 order concerned ratings collected at the point of purchase, before customers had received their goods, and used to inflate averages and review counts. It was not a finding about paid removal or suppression of negative reviews — conflating the two is common and wrong. The company has since rebranded to SmartCustomer and, since February 2026, requires proof of purchase from every reviewer.

eKomi

eKomi's published guidelines describe removing inadmissible review content, or obscuring it by replacing it with asterisks, while retaining the star rating. The numerical score stays in the average; the reader loses the reasoning behind it. We found no equivalent mechanism at any other platform here.

Feefo · REVIEWS.io

Feefo states that flagging a review for moderation removes it from public view during the process — and also that the flag is not intended simply to remove reviews, and that a negative review not violating the criteria will not be removed. Both are Feefo's own words and belong together. REVIEWS.io documents a 14-day grace period before critical reviews auto-publish, with configurable rules, and frames this as resolving issues without hiding legitimate feedback. We report each mechanism together with the platform's own framing.

Regulatory record

Regulators' own announcements only. Press coverage was not used. Absence of a finding is not evidence of none — we searched the FTC, CMA, AGCM and Bundeskartellamt.

Trustpilot

AGCM (Italy) · 23 March 2026

€4,000,000 penalty, case PS12962. Findings on the adequacy of authenticity checks, on paid services allowing businesses to select which consumers received review invitations, and on dark patterns.

Appeal status not verified.

Read the regulator's announcement

Sitejabber

FTC (United States) · 6 November 2024, final order January 2025

Order barring misrepresentation that ratings reflect customers who actually received their purchase. The allegation concerned ratings collected at the point of sale, before delivery.

Read the regulator's announcement

Google

CMA (United Kingdom) · 24 January 2025

Voluntary undertakings. Google committed to global bans for repeat offenders reviewing UK businesses, warning alerts on affected profiles, and three years of compliance monitoring.

Undertakings, not a finding of breach.

Read the regulator's announcement

Tripadvisor

AGCM (Italy) · 22 December 2014

€500,000 penalty, case PS9345, for misleading information about the sources of reviews.

Read the regulator's announcement

German market, sector-wide

Bundeskartellamt · 6 October 2020

Sector inquiry across more than 60 portals. Found fake reviews to be widespread and most platforms reliant on word filters or after-the-fact reports.

Inquiry only; no proceedings against individual firms.

Read the regulator's announcement

United States, cross-cutting

FTC · August 2024, effective October 2024

16 CFR Part 465 bans groundless legal threats or intimidation used to remove a negative review, and misrepresenting a filtered set of reviews as representative.

Read the regulator's announcement

What we could not verify

Published deliberately. A comparison that shows only what its author managed to find is not a comparison, it is a sales page.

  • kununu and jameda are absent entirely. Both domains were unreachable during compilation, and the German-language results for them are dominated by law-firm "get your review deleted" marketing, which we do not treat as a source for policy facts. Rather than publish rows built on secondary material, we left them out.
  • Yelp is only partially covered. Most of Yelp's help and business pages are disallowed to automated readers, so we publish only the statements we could actually retrieve and mark the rest unpublished.
  • Google's absence of a paid tier is inferred, not stated. We found no Google product affecting Business Profile review visibility, but also no page where Google says so. The cell reads "none identified" rather than "none".
  • Several plan-gating questions are open. Whether Trustindex's widget filtering, REVIEWS.io's grace period or Feefo's moderation flag are restricted to paid tiers is not stated on the pages we could read.
  • Appeal timelines are largely unpublished. Only Tripadvisor and Trustindex publish one.
  • We searched four regulators. A platform with no row in the regulatory section has not been cleared by anyone; it simply has no finding among those four.

Method

Every claim comes from the platform's own help centre, terms, transparency report or guidelines, or from a regulator's own announcement. Press coverage, competitor comparison pages and "best alternatives" articles were excluded as sources — in the course of this work we found them frequently inaccurate on exactly these questions, and often written by interested parties. Each page was read on the observation date above; policies change, and a claim here is a claim about that date. Where a platform's public statement and a regulator's finding conflict, both are reported and attributed.

Corrections are welcome and will be logged rather than silently applied. If you believe a cell is wrong, write to us with the source and we will fix it publicly.

Sources

All researchModeration policyPress & media