Round 8% of the 31.1 million opinions submitted to Tripadvisor in 2024 have been pretend, in keeping with the corporate’s “Transparency Report 2025.”
That is greater than twice the quantity detected in 2022, in keeping with firm studies.
However that does not imply the variety of pretend opinions on the location doubled, mentioned Becky Foley, vp and head of belief and security at Tripadvisor.
Whereas submissions to the web site elevated, Tripadvisor’s insurance policies on pretend opinions additionally modified, she mentioned, citing the corporate’s extra aggressive stance towards “incentivized opinions.” These happen when corporations supply prospects reductions or freebies in trade for opinions, or present incentives to workers whose names are talked about in opinions.
“The workers get their mother, finest pal or cousin to submit opinions, mentioning their names,” she mentioned. “It finally ends up resulting in companies having opinions that are not truly precious to our group.”
What’s a pretend assessment?
In line with Tripadvisor, it’s “any assessment submitted by somebody who’s knowingly submitting biased or non-firsthand content material, in an effort to control a property’s popularity.”
However there is a larger motive detections are on the rise, she mentioned.
“Our system is all the time getting higher,” she mentioned, citing Tripadvisor’s three-pronged course of that depends on auto-detection, human assessment and group suggestions.
Some 7% of submissions in 2024 have been auto-rejected earlier than being posted, the report mentioned. Auto-detections additionally flagged one other 5% of submissions for human assessment.
Nevertheless, Tripadvisor’s belief and security group in the end moderated greater than 4.2 million opinions, amounting to greater than 13% of all submissions in 2024, in keeping with the report.
One other 244,000 opinions have been disputed by members on the third stage of assessment, the report confirmed. Of those, some 72% remained on the location, and 28% have been eliminated, it mentioned.
How one can spot a pretend
Tripadvisor has 4 classes of pretend submissions: boosting, vandalism, member fraud and paid opinions, Foley mentioned.
There is a false impression that vandalism accounts for many pretend opinions, Foley mentioned, including that boosting (54%) and member fraud (39%) have lengthy made up the majority of these opinions.
Paid opinions (4.8%) are a smaller however “extra pernicious” class of fakes, she mentioned.
This consists of “assessment farms,” she mentioned, including that these authors are sometimes concerned in different kinds of on-line fraud too.
Most paid opinions originate in Asia, Foley mentioned, despite the fact that solely 17% of actual submissions got here from the continent final 12 months.
In 2024, greater than one-third of all paid submissions detected by Tripadvisor got here from Indonesia and Vietnam, whereas in 2022 most paid opinions got here from India, studies present.
A ‘cat and mouse’ recreation
Rooting out pretend opinions is a continuing “cat and mouse” recreation, Foley mentioned. However Tripadvisor is getting higher at detecting them yearly, she mentioned.
“We’re the primary to confess that we’re by no means going to succeed in absolute perfection,” mentioned Foley. “We would not catch [a fake] the primary time, however we’ll catch it will definitely.”
Tripadvisor makes use of its personal know-how, developed over 25 years, to flush out fakes — a system that more and more depends much less on what a assessment says, and extra on the way it’s posted, she mentioned. The corporate makes use of synthetic intelligence and behavioral biometrics to search out patterns, which may detect abnormalities like submission spikes and IP handle masking makes an attempt.
To catch paid reviewers, Tripadvisor investigators pose as pretend assessment brokers, Foley mentioned. When a foul actor posts their first paid assessment, “now we have all the knowledge … lots of of knowledge factors related to it,” which the corporate makes use of to construct patterns to determine different opinions submitted by the writer previously.
Violators aren’t pulled off the location, however their rankings are penalized for a 12 months, Foley mentioned. Repeat offenders obtain a purple badge on their itemizing “that claims this property is attempting to deceive you,” she mentioned.
AI opinions: not pretend, however not allowed
Most opinions written by AI should not pretend, Foley mentioned, calling that “one of many myths I like to bust.”
Most are written by common vacationers that use the know-how to make their writing extra polished, she mentioned.
Nonetheless, the corporate would not permit them — a minimum of not for now.
In 2024, Tripadvisor eliminated greater than 200,000 opinions that it suspected have been written by AI, in keeping with the corporate’s 2025 transparency report.
“We’ll proceed to watch the developments and patterns. However proper now, we simply don’t need vacationers to return to TripAdvisor for a sea of sameness.”