Fakespot: uncover fake reviews on Amazon, Yelp and Tripadvisor

Fakespot is a free online service that helps you uncover fake reviews on Amazon, Yelp, and Tripadvisor by analyzing reviews and grading them.

Most shopping, travel and business listing sites support user reviews. Reviews are designed to assist Internet users in making decisions. Should you eat in restaurant A or B, or buy that motherboard or another one.

One of the big issues with reviews is that anyone can leave them. This opens the door for fake reviews, especially since companies tend to favor products with good reviews over products with fewer or less good ratings.

Fakespot

It is sometimes difficult to spot fake reviews as a user as you have a limit amount of information available. You get a username, date and the review text. Some sites link to reviewer profiles on top of that.

You cannot trust the overall rating blindly and need to go through reviews manually to decide on a review by review basis whether it is legitimate or fake.

Fakespot assists you in that. It works by pasting an URL of an Amazon product page, Yelp or TripAdvisor business page in the form on the Fakespot website and selecting analyze afterward.

Results are displayed immediately if the URL is already in the Fakespot database, or analyzed on the fly if it is not.

Fakespot gives an overall rating from A to F, an overview of the analysis, a summary of reviews, and a list of unreliable reviewers.

The grade defines the percentage of reliable reviews and reviewers. Grade A product reviews are 90% or more reliable, Grade F product reviews up to 44% reliable only.

Fakespot’s analysis of reviews uses multiple data points that manual reviewers have a hard time getting their hands on. On Amazon, for example, it takes into account verified purchases, date and content correlations, purchasing patterns, and writing style among others.

The primary criteria is the language utilized by the reviewer, the profile of the reviewer,correlation with other reviewers data and machine learning algorithm that focuses on improving itself by detecting fraudulent reviews.

The technologies include: profile clusters, sentiment analysis, cluster correlation and artificial intelligence intertwined with these functionalities.

Fakespot supports select Amazon sites only at the time of writing. The supported sites are Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.com.au, and Amazon.in. All Vine and Discount Disclaimer reviews are considered unreliable by the service.

Closing Words

Fakespot is a handy service to get a first impression of the quality of reviews of a product on Amazon, Yelp, or TripAdvisor. I suggest you use it as a tool to get a quick reading on the quality of reviews of a product or business, but don’t use it exclusively. You may want to check reviews manually as well, at least some, to verify the claim that Fakespot makes.

Now Read: Analyze Amazon reviews for authenticity