TruthEngine is a system that indexes reviews, detects sentiment and looks for suspicious patterns in the data. It was built by the TruthEngine team, a company based in London.

It became clear to us how offensively easy it is to fake reviews without consequence. Over the years, fake reviewers and review websites have taken advantage of this ease which has created a broken system where reviews have become almost meaningless.

The system means fake review brokers and unscrupulous platforms win and unknowing consumers and genuine businesses lose.

We wanted to use our huge amount of technical skill and AI knowledge to engineer a solution to this broken system, helping consumers buy better and genuine businesses to thrive.

Up until recently, there have been no consequences for faking reviews. However, several countries, including the UK, will be introducing legislation to curb fake reviews. In the UK, this includes fines of up to 10% for perpetrators. You can read more about this legislation in our article here.

Businesses fake their own reviews to inflate their rating or to deflate their competitors' ratings. Many businesses reluctantly fake their own reviews because their competitors do, which has created a vicious circle of fakery.

We have indexed the reviews of every single restaurant in the UK and assigned each a score, down-weighting reviews that our technology detects as highly suspicious. This should give you a more accurate picture of how good a restaurant is. You can browse and filter restaurants.

TruthEngine Search is an exhaustive database of tens of millions of British restaurant reviews stretching from 2005 to the present day that is refreshed for new reviews daily.

This data enabled us to train our algorithm to detect suspicious patterns in the data, which it down weights to come up with a new, more accurate score.

TruthEngine Search is a website where we display these results, so you can filter for the best restaurants in a location or cuisine of your choice.

We analyse every review we find and apply our proprietary artificial intelligence to audit the authenticity of each review. Suspicious, anomalous or low-quality reviews are automatically down-weighted and a revised score is re-calculated, out of 100.

The five-star rating system is well known, but sadly it has become increasingly meaningless.

80% of the reviews we find are either 4 or 5 stars, and over 60% of the restaurants in our database are tightly clustered between 4 and 4.7 stars; this makes it increasingly difficult to choose between establishments.

By scoring out of 100 we can break the tightly-clustered bounds of the five-star rating system and introduce a far wider spectrum over which to differentiate establishments.

Because we rank on a curve, only 15% of the restaurants on our platform score 70 and over. Just 2.3% score over 80, and a score of 90 and above means that the restaurant in question should be truly exceptional.

We have indexed reviews from the major review platforms that make up the bulk of the UK’s restaurant reviews. These reviews are left by the public, for the public, and in the public’s interest but in order to protect our business we cannot name the specific platforms.

It’s impossible to tell for certain that a review is fake. However, our technology has analysed millions of reviews and learnt to detect the patterns that frequently occur in suspicious reviews.

Platforms have made some effort to detect fake reviews but progress has been slow and fake reviews are increasing in sophistication. Platforms need to be certain that a review is fake before they remove it, which can often be difficult or impossible to prove. In some cases, they have an incentive to turn a blind eye to review fakery.

We are currently expanding to other industries.If your industry is not covered and you think it should be, get in touch at business@truthengine.com.

We include all restaurants that have undergone a Food Hygiene Inspection. Please contact us if your business is not included at hello@truthengine.com.

We have no control over the reviews that determine your score. As a matter of principle, we do not adjust any individual scores, they are generated automatically by a mathematically rigorous weighting system that has analysed almost every restaurant review in the United Kingdom.

Because the results it generates are percentile-based scoring, only 15% of the restaurants on our platform score over 70. A restaurant with a score of over 86 would be in the top 1%.

The best way to improve your score is by receiving true positive reviews from your customers.

If you become TruthMark certified, we deliver monthly reports that offer actionable insights drawn from your reviews. This can be used by general managers and customer service professionals to improve your restaurant, and in turn, your reviews.

TruthMark is a badge that tells the public that you have agreed to have your reviews independently audited by our TruthEngine technology and they have been found to be genuine.

By agreeing to have your reviews independently authenticated, you are demonstrating to your customers that you value authenticity and that your reviews can be trusted. At a time when consumer trust in brands is an all-time low and high ESG credentials are becoming more important, brands that do not authenticate their reviews will fall behind their competitors.

Furthermore, we provide insights into your reviews that can help improve your establishment.

Our customer team can discuss certification with you to find out if you qualify. Email us at business@truthengine.com or visit our for business page for more contact information.

We are always open to hearing from people who are interested in working with us. We give more information about our open vacancies and the perks of working with us on our LinkedIn page.

Please see our for business page