Since 6 April 2025, writing a fake review, commissioning one, concealing that a review was incentivised, and publishing reviews in a misleading way have all been banned outright under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. Read reviews knowing that — and check the public registers as well.
What exactly is banned?
The unfair commercial practices provisions in Part 4 Chapter 1 of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 came into force on 6 April 2025, replacing the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008. Schedule 20 of the Act lists practices that are unfair in all circumstances — there is no defence of reasonableness, no balancing exercise. Paragraph 13 covers reviews, and it has three limbs:
- Paragraph 13(1)(a) — submitting, or commissioning another person to submit or write, "a fake consumer review".
- Paragraph 13(1)(b) — submitting or commissioning "a consumer review that conceals the fact it has been incentivised".
- Paragraph 13(2) — "publishing consumer reviews, or consumer review information, in a misleading way".
- Paragraph 13(3) — publishing consumer reviews or review information "without taking such reasonable and proportionate steps as are necessary" to prevent fake or concealed-incentive reviews being published.
Read those together and the scope is wider than "don’t write fake reviews". The third and fourth limbs put a duty on the platform: a site that publishes reviews has to take reasonable and proportionate steps against fakes, and must not present what it has in a misleading way — which the Competition and Markets Authority’s guidance treats as covering things like burying negative reviews or showing a star rating that does not reflect the underlying reviews.
The CMA published its guidance on the unfair commercial practices provisions, CMA207, on 4 April 2025.
Are incentivised reviews illegal?
No — concealing the incentive is. A business may ask customers for reviews, and may offer something in return, provided the review makes the incentive clear. What paragraph 13(1)(b) prohibits is the review that reads as spontaneous when it was paid for.
So "I was given a discount for leaving this review" is a lawful review. The same words without that sentence, for the same discount, are not.
This is a useful lens when reading. A page full of reviews with no incentive disclosure anywhere, for a business that visibly runs a review-for-discount promotion, is describing a mismatch.
What about badges, memberships and endorsements?
Schedule 20 covers those too, and the same all-circumstances rule applies.
Paragraph 1 bans "claiming to be a signatory to a code of conduct when the trader is not". Paragraph 4 bans claiming that a trader, their commercial practice or a product "has been approved, endorsed or authorised by a public or private body" where the claim is false, or where the terms of the approval "have not been, or are not being, complied with".
That second limb is the sharper one. A trader who joined a scheme, let the membership lapse, and left the logo on the van is within it. So is one whose registration covers a narrower category of work than the badge implies.
The remedy is not to distrust every badge. It is to check the one that matters, on the scheme’s own register, which takes a minute.
How should you actually read a set of reviews?
Reviews are still evidence. They are just weaker evidence than the things you can verify, and they should be read as testimony rather than as a score.
- Read the specific ones, not the average. A review that names the job, the problem and how it was handled tells you something. "Great service, highly recommend" tells you nothing, in either direction.
- Read the negative ones and the replies. How a business answers a complaint is a better predictor of your own experience than how it performs when nothing goes wrong.
- Look at the spread over time. A long history of ordinary reviews behaves differently from a cluster that arrived in one week.
- Be suspicious of uniformity, in both directions. Real customers write at different lengths, about different things, with different degrees of grammar.
- Check whether the reviewer bought anything. Platforms that verify a transaction are producing a different kind of evidence from platforms that accept anything typed into a box.
- Never treat a rating as a substitute for a registration check. No number of five-star reviews makes an unregistered gas engineer lawful to use.
Why does this directory not publish ratings?
Because publishing them honestly is a serious, ongoing job, and publishing them badly is now unlawful as well as useless.
Paragraph 13(3) requires anyone publishing consumer reviews to take reasonable and proportionate steps against fake and concealed-incentive reviews. Paragraph 13(2) prohibits presenting reviews or review information in a misleading way. A small directory that bolted on a star rating without the moderation, verification and reporting capability to stand behind it would be taking on exactly those duties with none of the means to discharge them.
So Promote Your Business publishes no star ratings, no scores and no customer reviews. Every submission is checked before it appears. If the business’s own website names it and the details are complete, it is published automatically; anything else is read by a person, who checks the business is real, the details make sense, and the category and location are right. Nothing is scraped from other sites. That is a check on the listing, not an endorsement of anyone’s work.
What the directory does instead is state, on each category page, what UK law requires of that trade and how to verify it yourself. That is information we can stand behind, because it is public record rather than opinion.
What can you do about a review you think is fake?
Report it to the platform first — under paragraph 13(3) they are the ones under a duty to take reasonable and proportionate steps, and they have the account data nobody else can see.
Beyond that, the unfair commercial practices provisions are enforced by the Competition and Markets Authority and by local Trading Standards. Citizens Advice runs the consumer service that gives advice and passes reports through to Trading Standards. The CMA acts on patterns of conduct rather than individual complaints, so a report is a contribution to enforcement rather than a route to your own remedy.
What to do next
Use reviews as one input, weighted below the checks that produce a definite answer. Before you contact anyone, look up whichever register applies to the trade — our guide to checking a UK trader is registered goes through them one by one, and every category page here sets out what the law requires of that trade.
Then, before any money changes hands, get the scope and total price in writing. A written quote you can hold a trader to is worth more than any number of stars.