Why you can trust reviews less and less, and what still makes a real customer review valuable

This article is loosely based on Consumers wary of ‘AI slop,’ still trust online reviews (Digital Commerce 360).

Reviews have become a strange kind of anchor. We base purchases on them, we read them before we walk into a place, and at the same time we all really know that some of them are not genuine. How can something be so important and so shaky at once?

A paradox that says a lot

Trust in reviews is in fact rising. Research by Omnisend, early in 2026, shows that over 80 percent of consumers say they trust online reviews, and that some trust them more than they did two years ago. At the same time, Capital One found that on average about 30 percent of online reviews are fake or ingenuine, and that 82 percent of consumers encountered at least one fake review in the past year. How do you reconcile that? Probably like this: precisely because the rest of the internet is harder and harder to trust thanks to AI, people cling to the judgement of another human being. A review feels more genuine than what a business says about itself. But feeling genuine is not the same as being genuine.

AI makes faking easy

In the past, a false review cost time and money: someone had to write it. That is over. A large academic study, published in the Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research, analysed over 700,000 reviews and found that AI-generated fake reviews are often more comprehensible and smoother than real ones, with fewer concrete details and less exaggeration. In other words, the forgery sometimes reads more pleasantly than the truth. That makes it harder and harder, for you and for the search engine or AI reading the reviews, to tell the genuine from the fake.

The real problem has two sides

What it comes down to is verification, and that has two sides. On the one hand: is the writer of the review actually a real customer, or a friend, a competitor, a troll, or an AI? On the other hand: is the business receiving the review actually a real business, or a shell posing as one? As we become less and less able to establish either, everyone muddles along, because there is no single, clear system. That is no reproach to Google or to any platform. It is an open question the whole sector is wrestling with.

So what then?

A possible answer becomes obvious once you sharpen the question. A review is only really worth something if it comes from someone who genuinely bought something from you. Not everyone who walked past, but the real buyer. And transparency about the way you collect reviews is not a side issue here but the heart of it: showing that you leave nothing out and invent nothing is ultimately worth more than a row of spotless five stars.

What PVwebsites does with this

This touches directly on what we work on. In an analysis we look at which trust signals can be found around your website, honestly and with due caution. And we are developing our own review system in which only real buyers can respond, numbered and dated, so that it is visible that nothing is held back. No advice to throw away Google or other systems, but an honest explanation of why no current system suffices on its own.

The PVwebsites tool is an accessible and affordable way to look at the current state of your website from several angles. The Vision Document that comes out of it can bring you new insights and ideas, for just €9.95. A subscription will follow soon, letting you track over time how changes to your website keep producing different results. More insight, at an affordable price.