Notes on Working With TrustPilot

Consumers often consider TrustPilot to be the most trusted review platform on the Internet, but for brands working with them is not always a pleasant experience. These are some notes about getting the most out of what a lot of people see as a problematic or controversial partner.

These are real-world tactics I used to help a national retailer restore a tarnished reputation, even when the system didn’t feel entirely fair. They are no longer trading so we are not stepping on anyone’s toes.

Like a few of my recent blog posts, this article started life as some informal notes written for a client, repurposed here in case they are of use to anyone else. It is very much my own view but nothing is particularly controversial – everything I touch on is pretty common practice.

The core message is that life got easier when we acknowledged that TrustPilot is (at best) a neutral supplier. They were not motivated by helping our business, and were not available to assist when bad things happened. If you treat it like a tool and not a partner, it can deliver the results you need, or at least become less of a risk.

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How TrustScore Works

TrustPilot keeps the exact TrustScore formula secret, but here’s what we know:

• It is based on percentages
• Fewer total reviews means each one matters more
• As your account grows, it gets harder to improve, but also harder for a single incident to tank your score
• It is based on the last 12 months of data

Customers are asked to provide ratings out of 10, but the public TrustScores are generally displayed out of 5.

Every TrustPilot account starts with three ‘7/10’ reviews. It’s a simple trick that stabilizes new accounts and prevents a single review from sending the TrustScore plummeting to 1/5 or all the way up to 5/5.

The more reviews you collect, the less influence each one has. On a new profile a single 5-star review might bump a score from 4.3 to 4.4, while later on it could take dozens to achieve the same thing. That’s how the algorithm works. It’s all about percentages.

You shouldn’t obsess over the total number of reviews. As long as you have enough reviews to look credible, the score itself is more important. Your main competitor might have double the reviews, but if your TrustScore is higher, you will usually convert better because of it. It will also be easier to maintain and increase your score.

Don’t expect only 5-Star Reviews

For most businesses, it isn’t feasible to expect every review to be 5-star. Don’t worry, that is perfectly fine. In fact, for most consumers, a perfect record just looks suspicious. There are still ways to manage your score effectively without it feeling artificial.

The Internet is for Bad Reviews

The simple truth is that that when left to their own devices consumers are much more likely to leave negative reviews. You have to actively ask for positive reviews.

This plays into TrustPilot’s hands, as they charge to access the tools to help mitigate negative feedback. You don’t have to pay to achieve this, but paying does make life easier.

Service Reviews are a Challenge

TrustPilot allows ‘service’ reviews – so visitors can review their experience even if they did not buy anything.

For example, a service review could simply say “I visited this site several times this morning but it was not available. Disappointed, 1 star“. That is perfectly within the rules and cannot usually be appealed. Sadly this loophole is sometimes used for malicious purposes.

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Can You Review Yourself?

Technically you shouldn’t, but in the real world self-serving reviews are commonplace.

There is only one instance where I think this is acceptable, and that is when your profile is under attack. I would also only recommend this for smaller companies where the impact of malicious reviews can be disproportionate. If you represent a large brand with a good flow of reviews it’s really not worth it.

How to do it safely:

• Use a fresh email or a genuine existing account
• Ask the reviewer to visit your site and arrive at TrustPilot through a TrustBox link or a genuine review invitation
• Use a clean device or IP address (they do monitor this)
• Vary the language and tone (or get someone else to do it)
• Don’t make every review a 5-star

All of the above points boil down to “ask your mum/sister/cousin to do it”. Unless you live in Wales that is at least three clean, untraceable reviews that can be called upon when genuinely needed. You can probably find half a dozen such reviewers if you try.

If done carefully you will probably get away with it, but do not do this casually or regularly. Save it for emergencies – such as when a malicious 1-star review is obviously scaring customers away.

If You Can Wait…

A much safer alternative is to simply send a fresh wave of invites to recent happy customers. This will push newer, more balanced content above the negative reviews.

Just be aware that sometimes new reviewers will show solidarity with bad reviews even if they aren’t personally affected.

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The 12-Month Rule

Only reviews from the past 12 months are used to calculate your TrustScore. Older reviews remain visible online but do not influence the live score.

This rolling window is a blessing after a rough patch. For instance, we were once targeted by an organised effort by HotUKDeals forum members to sabotage our TrustPilot score and online reputation. It was painful for a while but once those reviews were removed from the calculation the score bounced back.

Scores Only Update When a New Review is Posted

Despite the 12-month rule, a brands TrustScore will not update until a new review is posted. This can allow inactive businesses to stay near the top of listings indefinitely.

Fortunately, service reviews provide a quick workaround. A reviewer could legitimacy post something like “I visited this site based on their great TrustPilot score, but sadly it looks like they are no longer trading. 2*”. That should be enough to trigger a recalculation.

If you are uncomfortable leaving a low rating your intervention does not have to be 1*. Even a 5* review on a long dormant profile should force a fairer recalculation.

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Collecting Reviews

I am often asked “Do I really have to invite every customer to leave a review?”.

Generally, yes you should. In reality, most high-performing accounts do moderate who they invite in some way. This is probably the main tactic used to manipulate TrustPilot, and I’ll be honest, it’s what I did.

Common tactics include:

• Only sending invites when delivery was within your service promise
• Excluding special cases such as pre-orders
• Suppressing invites for customers who experienced delays or issues
• Splitting review requests between two platforms such as TrustPilot and Feefo. (Which is allowed in the TP terms, as long as the split is random)

The approach I used was to only send automated invites to customers whose orders were in stock and fulfilled with next-day delivery.

This small adjustment still reached >80% of customers, felt organic, and prompted a natural range of scores. As older, more toxic reviews ‘aged out’ after 12 months and were replaced at a slower rate the TrustScore steadily increased from 3.6 to over 4.5.

After speaking to other businesses in the same industry, including their biggest competitor, I think it is safe to say everyone adopted a similar policy. Service levels in that industry are not that good, yet these changes only bought us on par with everyone else.

Verified Reviews

Use verified invites wisely. They boost credibility but limit your options.

Reviews from official invites are marked as “verified,” which enhances their perceived credibility. However, once published, verified reviews, especially negative ones, are far harder to remove.

If you are under ‘attack’, for example when HUKD members were attacking us, providing them with the means to place verified reviews would have made the matter even worse.

It is better not to send automatic invites to potentially toxic reviewers, or switch to a generic trustpilot link that doesn’t automatically flag reviews as ‘verified’.

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Should You Use TrustPilot’s Review Invite System?

TrustPilot can automatically send emails inviting your customers to leave a review, or you can do it yourself.

You have a few options:

1) Use TrustPilot’s Automatic Invite System

Since the email comes from TrustPilot it looks credible, and you don’t have to worry about email deliverability.

2) Send Invitations Yourself (Manually)

3) Upload a Recipient List Yourself (Recommended)

This is the best middle ground for most small-to-medium businesses, and the method I usually recommend. TrustPilot provides a sample .csv template with basic fields like name, email, Order ID and purchase date, so you can just fill it with the customers most likely to be happy.

How it works:

• You export a list of customers who had a good experience (or didn’t have a very obvious bad experience).
• Upload the .csv file to TrustPilot’s backend once a week or month
• TrustPilot sends verified invites on your behalf

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Navigating the Category System

All businesses on TrustPilot are assigned to at least one category. However, by default their online interface will only show a selected range of profiles.

To show up in the default filters a profile must:

1. Have at least 25 reviews
2. Show activity in the last 12 months
3. Be flagged as “actively inviting” reviews

These rules favour paying accounts, but free accounts can qualify. Point 3 (actively inviting users) is usually the sticking point. There is a hidden tick-box in your admin panel to let TP know you are actively asking for reviews. Find that, tick it, and you’re set.

In late 2019, TrustPilot synchronised their categories with those used by Google Ads. If you are running PPC or retargeting it makes sense to choose categories that match your paid audience.

• You can choose multiple categories
• Select a primary category that best fits your core product/service
• Some categories are very competitive, while others may be an easy path to top placement
• Some old pre-2019 categories remain, but they are harder for visitors to find.

If you are in the UK there are several holes in the category structure where the US-centric categories are not translated or represented properly.

For example, there isn’t really a ‘perfect’ category for contract mobile phone retailers. There is still a pre-2019 category called ‘mobile phone store’ (with the more American ‘cell phone store’ in the URL), but users cannot easily find or navigate to it.

The best you can do is submit your site to as many relevant categories as you can, and make sure at least one of them can be found in the category tree in the top menu.

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Disputing Reviews

TrustPilot allows businesses to report individual reviews they believe are false or misleading, but there is a catch. If you submit too many cases that are not upheld, your account will be penalised or sanctioned.

The penalties are automatically applied based on percentages, which are not generous.

If the raw volume or ratio of reviews you receive or the disputes you raise change significantly this can easily trigger sanctions. Not necessarily because you are being naughty, but due to how the shift impacts Trustpilot’s very simplistic formula.

I once received sanctions because we briefly stopped disputing reviews when a staff member went on holiday. When we raised just two cases the following week just one was declined and interpreted as a 50% decline rate. That triggered an automatic ban to prevent us from ‘abusing the system’. As I said, it’s a very simple formula.

The whole process is not especially fair, transparent, or well designed. I would encourage anyone who needs to do this regularly to read all the guidance available, think about how they apply to your business. Never be tempted to bend the rules on this process or overuse it.

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A Note on the TrustBox Widget 

There is only one ‘”‘official'”‘ way to show your Trustpilot score on your site – the official “TrustBox” widget.

They look quite good and do showcase your TP score prominently, but they also come with downsides. On our site we observed that the TrustBox also loaded a lot of third-party analytics scripts, noticeably increasing the page loading times.

The results of these analytics were not shared with us, so we did think it was inappropriate for TP to be gathering so much info about our users. When it came to integrating with the new GDPR rules (we are talking a few years ago here), TrustPilot simply couldn’t share a list of the data they store and process, so it was almost impossible to make it GDPR compliant.

This was several years ago, but tread carefully – I am sure some things have changed and some haven’t. If you can share your TrustScore in a different way (like a regularly updated static image), that may be safer and quicker. The only other benefit is that TrustPilot can tell when a reviewer arrives via a TrustBox, helping them to ‘trust’ the review, and attracting less scrutiny of your account.

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You Have to Fix the Underlying Issues

It should go without saying, but no amount of finessing will increase your scores if your service levels are consistently bad. We can help good feedback bubble to the top, but if you regularly deserve bad reviews you won’t make much progress. You do have to look honestly at your service levels address the underlying issues.

A lot of our problems came from the technical implementation of TrustPilot and the way we managed the account, but there were plenty of loose ends to tidy up as well. The most argumentative customer support manager was moved to an IT support desk, and we stopped selling the most controversial product – mainly for commercial reasons, but it still helped.

There was much more we could have done, but that tipped the scales in our favour. Remember the 12 month effective period; If the average score of your current reviews is higher than the same time last year, your TrustScore should go up.

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Reported Numbers

Over time TrustPilot has been automating more processes. They reported that in 2023, 3.3 million reviews were removed, with over 80% by automatic systems rather than the manual review process. However, they didn’t tell us how many if they were malicious posts by users or attempts by retailers to manipulate the TrustScore system. Since anyone can readily purchase thousands of low quality fake reviews on Fiverr for just a few pounds, that 3.3 million reviews could just represent the low-hanging mass-generated fruit.

They also issued 46,000 warnings to businesses violating guidelines and published nearly 7,000 public consumer warnings on company profiles.

That’s why I advocate a low-key response. Don’t stand out with huge interventions or attempt to ‘game the system’ for a big advantage. Just move with the herd and make small but meaningful adjustments that mitigate the risk of their their more harmful policies and processes.

Recent Changes

In 2025 TrustPilot made two positive changes. First, they updated the process for reporting reviews by allowing retailers to provide more detailed explanations.

Second, they stopped automatically prompting every unverified reviewer to provide proof of purchase. This is good. The TrustPilot dispute team can’t possibly understand every business and product on the platform, so they often approved incorrect or fabricated evidence. By only asking for evidence of a purchase when it is needed they lighten their workload and reduce unnecessary errors.

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Good Luck

The biggest change for us was acknowledging that we did not enjoy working with Trustpilot, and that they presented a risk as much as an opportunity.

Once you get past their sales pitch TrustPilot don’t attempt or pretend to be a partner or ally, and that’s fine, as long as you know what you’re buying. Once we accepted that TP was a tool and not a friend, we made peace with being strategic, selective, and just a little bit subversive when required.

• Use their tools, but don’t overpay unless you need to
• Some features have a usage cap. You can negotiate higher limits if you get your account manager onside
• Solicit reviews strategically
• Know how the score is calculated
• Understand all processes intimately
• Don’t expect TP to be ‘fair’
• Never put all your trust in one platform