Last Updated on September 11, 2026
When a regulator says “fake reviews”, most owners picture a review farm. Someone paid a couple of pounds a time to write five-star nonsense about a product they have never touched. Owners hold that picture up against their own conscience, find it clean, and move on.
That is the wrong thing to check.
The Competition and Markets Authority opened five online review investigations in March 2026. In its press release it said it expects to make an update on those investigations in September 2026. That is this month. Not one of the five is about a review farm.
What the CMA is actually investigating
These are the CMA’s own descriptions, taken from its press release of 27 March 2026. No findings have been made and no conclusions reached.
| Business | What the CMA is looking at |
|---|---|
| Autotrader and Feefo | Whether a number of 1-star reviews, moderated by Feefo, were not published on Autotrader’s platform and were not counted towards star ratings |
| Dignity | Whether Dignity asked staff to write positive reviews about the company’s crematoria services |
| Just Eat | Whether its ratings system has inflated certain restaurants’ and grocers’ star ratings |
| Pasta Evangelists | Whether customers were offered discounts on future orders in exchange for leaving 5-star reviews, without this being disclosed |
Read that list as an owner rather than as a lawyer.
A bad review quietly moderated out. Staff asked to leave a positive one. A star rating that flatters. A discount offered in exchange for a review, with nobody told.
None of that is exotic. It is a Tuesday afternoon in a lot of UK businesses.
The line most small businesses have never read
The CMA published a short guide for businesses on 4 April 2025. It says the rules apply to any trader who publishes consumer reviews or consumer review information, including reviews and ratings originally collated by someone else.
It then lists the publication formats you are responsible for: websites, social media, search services, online marketplaces, specialist review sites, trader recommendation platforms, and print publications.
Work that through.
- A testimonials page is a website publishing consumer reviews.
- A Google star rating dropped into your homepage is consumer review information.
- “Rated 4.9 by over 200 customers” on a leaflet is a print publication.
If you display reviews, you are a publisher under this law. A plumber with nine testimonials sits in the same legal category as Just Eat. The obligations scale with your size and your risk. The category does not.
This is the same shift we wrote about when the ASA scanned 60 million UK ads without waiting for a complaint. Enforcement is moving away from reacting to complaints and towards checking what is already on display.
What publishing reviews actually obliges you to do
The CMA’s short guide sets out three things publishers need in place.
A published policy. One that clearly prohibits fake reviews and states your approach to incentivised reviews and to aggregate ratings. Published, meaning a visitor could find it.
A risk assessment. An assessment of the risk that banned content appears in the content you control, repeated regularly rather than done once and filed.
Processes. Ways to detect suspect reviews, investigate them, and act on them, plus a regular check on whether those processes work.
The standard throughout is reasonable and proportionate. The CMA lists the factors, including where your reviews come from and how many you publish. A sole trader showing eleven Google reviews is not being asked to build Trustpilot’s moderation stack. They are being asked to have thought about it and written it down.
Why this is a Start problem, not a compliance problem
Structure before scale. The reason to fix this is not a fine at the end of a process most small businesses will never be part of. It is that displayed proof which does not survive a check is worth less than no proof at all.
We found exactly that when we checked 100 UK directory listings against Companies House and 29 failed. The badge was on the page. The company behind it was not there to be found.
It matters more now that AI assistants read ratings on a buyer’s behalf before that buyer ever reaches your site. Our ledger of how accurate AI business recommendations actually are shows these systems lean hard on aggregate signals, and they do not stop to ask whether yours was earned.
Four questions to answer this week
- Where, across your site, your social profiles and your printed material, do you display reviews or a star rating?
- Have you ever offered anything in exchange for a review, and did you say so publicly?
- Have you ever removed, or declined to publish, a genuine negative review?
- Does the rating you display match the full set of reviews sitting behind it?
The takeaway
The crackdown is not aimed at the reviews you collect. It is aimed at the gap between what your customers actually said and what a stranger sees when they land on your page.
Close that gap and this costs you an afternoon and a short policy page. Leave it open and you are betting that nobody, human or machine, ever looks twice.
