Trustpilot and Paid Rankings: What's Behind the Accusations

Trustpilot is one of the most well-known review platforms. The company has recently faced accusations of review manipulation: selective moderation, removal of positive reviews, and rating dependency on paid subscriptions.

In this piece, we break down the allegations against Trustpilot, the arguments put forward by researchers, what the Italian regulator found, and how the platform responds to the claims.

Trustpilot's Business Model

Trustpilot operates on a freemium model. Companies can claim a profile and use the platform's basic features for free, while a paid subscription unlocks additional tools for collecting and analyzing reviews. According to Trustpilot's own data, of 1.3 million business profiles, only 3.1% pay for additional features, while over 97% use the platform without a subscription.

Paid plans differ in feature sets and the number of review invitations: from 50 invitations per month on the free plan to 1,000 on Premium. The review collection mechanism itself became one of the key points in the Italian regulator's case, which found that businesses could selectively choose which consumers to send invitations to.

In March 2026, Italy's competition authority AGCM fined Trustpilot Group Plc, Trustpilot A/S, and Trustpilot S.r.l. a total of €4 million, finding that the platform inadequately verified the authenticity of reviews — including those marked as verified — and that its review collection tools allowed businesses to cherry-pick which consumers received invitations.

The regulator also cited insufficient transparency regarding how the platform operates and how businesses use paid services. Trustpilot disagreed with the ruling and announced its intention to appeal.

The Grizzly Research Investigation

The first systematic allegations emerged in a Grizzly Research report published on December 4, 2025. The researchers claimed that Trustpilot creates business profiles with negative reviews in order to push those businesses into buying a subscription, and that paid profiles can achieve significantly higher ratings. As supporting evidence, Grizzly compared ratings of paid and free profiles across various industries and countries.

Grizzly Research is a short-seller and disclosed a short position in Trustpilot shares prior to publishing the report. The claims made in the report have not been independently verified. Trustpilot rejected the allegations and stated it had not received a request for comment before publication.

A similar situation is described by LTC Casino in its own Trustpilot breakdown. The author claims that after attempting to purchase a Starter plan at $99 per month, they were offered a more expensive package, and after declining, their account was downgraded to the minimum tier. Shortly after, positive reviews on the profile stopped appearing, while negative ones remained visible.

There is no independent confirmation of this case in public sources, so it does not conclusively prove a direct link between review visibility and payment.

Trustpilot's Position

Trustpilot denies that a paid subscription has any effect on moderation or TrustScore. The company states that the same rules apply to both paid and free profiles, and that the commercial team has no influence over review-related decisions. Trustpilot states that approximately 200 employees work on trust and safety, and that in the first 11 months of 2025, the platform removed 6.7 million reviews.

The company also notes that over 97% of businesses on the platform do not pay for a subscription. Of the 1.3 million claimed business profiles, only 3.1% are paid. At the same time, in 2025, Trustpilot took action against over 330 paid businesses, and revoked subscriptions from 39 of them due to fake reviews. Among the reviews removed during that period, negative ones accounted for 14% of removals for both free and paid profiles.

These figures come from Trustpilot itself. Out of approximately 40,000 paid businesses, 39 lost their subscriptions over the course of a year due to review manipulation or fabrication. Whether this is sufficient to assess the effectiveness of moderation cannot be determined from the data provided.

Other Cases of Review Manipulation

Individual cases show that companies can also manipulate reviews on such platforms. In the NextMed case, the FTC charged the company with selectively disputing negative reviews on Trustpilot, offering gift cards in exchange for their removal, and posting fake positive reviews. In the LendEDU case, the regulator finalized a settlement over fake reviews and paid rankings of financial products.

LTC Casino also compared the ratings of companies with paid and free Trustpilot accounts. JustAnswer, which the FTC sued in January 2026 over covert enrollment in recurring monthly subscriptions, holds a rating of 4.6 "Excellent" on a paid account. CarShield, which agreed to a $10 million FTC settlement in 2024 over deceptive advertising, holds a rating of 4.1 "Great," also on a paid subscription. 

Shutterstock and Uber have no subscription. Both companies have also faced serious FTC complaints, yet they hold ratings of 1.2 "Bad" and 1.8 "Poor" respectively.

The sample is small and does not prove a direct link between paying for a subscription and a higher rating — other factors may also be at play. However, the difference in ratings relative to the complaints is notable enough to warrant attention.

Conclusion

There is currently no evidence that Trustpilot adjusts business ratings based on subscription payments. At the same time, the AGCM found violations in how reviews are verified, how they are collected, and in the platform's overall transparency. For this reason, a Trustpilot rating should be treated not as an unconditional measure of reputation, but considered alongside other sources and information about the business itself.