If you publish reviews, you have to say how you check them
This isn’t a design detail: presenting ratings as verified when they aren’t is an unfair commercial practice. It is fixed with one well-written paragraph and an honest decision.
If you display customer ratings, you must state whether you check that they come from consumers who actually used the product or service, and how you check. Publishing fake reviews, commissioning them, or presenting unverified reviews as verified is an unfair commercial practice.
The rule doesn’t require you to verify reviews. It requires you to tell the truth about whether you verify them. Those are two different things, and the second is far cheaper to comply with.
What is prohibited outright: publishing invented reviews, paying someone to write them, commissioning negative reviews of a competitor, and presenting as verified any ratings that haven’t been checked.
It also covers how you present them. If you show a star average, that average has to come from the same set of reviews the customer can read — not from a selection of the good ones.
Who it applies to
Any site displaying customer opinions or scores: an online shop, a restaurant site reproducing its Google stars, a clinic with testimonials. Business size makes no difference here.
What happens if you don’t
Unfair commercial practices against consumers are penalised through consumer law, handled in Catalonia by the Agència Catalana del Consum. The complaint usually comes from a competitor or an unhappy customer rather than from a routine inspection.
Source RDL 1/2007 (TRLGDCU), consumer infringement and penalty regime
What we do
What it means in your trade
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Bars and restaurants
Most places reproduce their Google stars on the site. That is allowed, but you have to say they come from Google, that Google doesn’t verify a purchase, and link to the profile so all of them can be read — not just the five-star ones.
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Neighbourhood retail and services
In an online shop verification is genuinely easy: the review is requested by email from someone with a delivered order, and then you really can say only buyers write them. This is the case where verifying pays for itself.
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Salons and clinics
Be careful in healthcare: beyond this rule, advertising healthcare services has its own limits on testimonials implying outcomes. Here we usually recommend reviews on the Google profile rather than testimonials on the site.
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Trades and workshops
Ask for them as the job finishes, with a direct link to the profile. What you shouldn’t do is copy them by hand onto the site without saying where they came from or whether anyone checked them.
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Tourism and nautical
Booking and Airbnb reviews are tied to a real stay, and you can say so. What you can’t do is blend verified reviews and ones you collected yourself into a single average.
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Firms and practices
In professions with a duty of confidentiality, a named testimonial can be a bigger problem than the review rules. Publishing judgement and anonymised matters usually beats publishing stars.
Questions about reviews
If your question isn’t here, write to us and we’ll answer it. Contact
Can I show only the good reviews?
You can choose what you display, but you can’t show an average calculated across all of them beside a selection of only the good ones, or imply that selection is the whole set. If you filter, you have to say what you filter on.
What if a customer leaves a fake review?
You can reply publicly and ask the platform to remove it through whatever channel it offers. What you can’t do is respond by commissioning positive reviews to balance it out: that puts you on the wrong side of the same rule.
Am I obliged to verify reviews?
No. You can state clearly that you don’t check whether the writer was a customer, and that complies. What you can’t do is stay silent or imply otherwise. Verifying is a commercial decision, not a legal obligation.
Does this affect the stars that show in Google?
The Google profile is run by Google and its transparency is Google’s business. What affects you is what you reproduce on your own site: the moment you copy those stars onto your page, explaining them becomes your obligation.
Does your site show ratings?
Send us the link. We’ll tell you by email whether the statement is missing and how it should read. We don’t charge to look.
- Or directly
- hola@appnweb.site
- Monday to Friday, 09:00 – 18:00 (CET)