What Review Platforms Actually Sell
There's a common assumption that review platforms exist solely to help consumers make better decisions.
That isn't quite right.
They do, but primarily, they exist to monetise trust.
Reviews and scores are not a by-product of the system - they ‘are' the product.
Once you understand that, the shortfalls in online reviews begin to make much more sense.
Reviews are the Product
At a basic level, review platforms collect and display feedback. But commercially, what they are really accumulating is a large, highly-visible dataset designed to influence purchasing behaviour.
- the more authoritative it appears
- the more visible it becomes in search
- the more reviews it receives
- the more valuable its reviews become
Ratings are a Conversion Tool
Research from Harvard Business School found that a one-star increase in a business's average rating is associated with a 5-9% increase in revenue (Luca, HBS). BrightLocal's consumer surveys consistently show that most consumers will not consider a business rated below 4.0. Similarly, analysis by the Spiegel Research Center found that products with higher review scores convert at significantly higher rates, even when price and brand are held constant.
This is why good review scores are so important, why they are surfaced so prominently and why they are so closely curated.
A Critical Distinction: Two Different Review Models
At this point, it's important to distinguish between the two different types of review platform, which are often grouped together but operate under different incentives.
On business-review platforms like Trustpilot, the reviews are the product.
Visitors come to these platforms looking to compare and evaluate businesses. Providing this service and hosting the reviews costs the platforms. They recoup these costs via commercial relationships with a percentage of the businesses whose reviews they're gathering. These enterprise customers pay the platforms for deeper relationships, active account management and for the right to display their scores and reviews in the marketing they do.
On product or marketplace platforms, the reviews are of the products and the platform's primary revenues come either directly or indirectly from selling the products being reviewed.
Where the review is the product, there is obviously strong commercial pressure from both the platform and customer to ensure the reviews being collected and the score being displayed are worth the effort and cost.
Where the reviews are of the product, the pressure to maintain a high score is less direct but still real, given the crucial role reviews play in ranking, visibility and sales.
The Dynamics of Business-funded Review Platforms
In most well-known review ecosystems, consumers supply the reviews but it is the businesses who are being reviewed who are funding it via paid visibility, tools, analytics, reputation management, moderation and dispute mechanisms.
Clearly this does not mean these platforms are selling positive reviews but it does mean that both the platforms and their paying subscribers' commercial incentives are more mutually aligned around engagement, conversion and scores, than forensic neutrality.
Consumers Provide the Value
From a business-model perspective, the consumers viewing or leaving the reviews are not the customer. The reviews they leave, the searches they do and the trust they have combine to create an asset which the platform monetises.
Consumer participation is crucial to giving the system value and credibility but it's important to recognise that it is not the consumers actually keeping the lights on - it's the businesses paying to display their reviews.
Why This Matters
Modern review platforms are motivated and optimised to:
- grow review volume
- surface persuasive signals for their customers
- support their customers' commercial outcomes
They are not optimised to act as a neutral record of customer experience.
That distinction mattered less when reviews were scarce and hard to manipulate. As review volumes have exploded and AI has made synthetic content cheap and scalable, it has become an increasingly important one to remember.
The Takeaway
Reviews are not broken. They are doing exactly what the systems behind them want them to do.
The mistake is treating platforms built to monetise trust as if they were neutral judges of it.
Reviews still play an important role in informing decisions, but consumers need to be aware of the dynamics of business-funded review platforms before trusting them wholeheartedly to inform the decisions they make!
Written by Daniel Mohacek on January 30, 2026
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