Round 8% of the 31.1 million opinions submitted to Tripadvisor in 2024 had been pretend, in accordance with the corporate’s “Transparency Report 2025.”
That is greater than twice the quantity detected in 2022, in accordance with firm experiences.
However that does not imply the variety of pretend opinions on the location doubled, stated Becky Foley, vice chairman 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 stated, citing the corporate’s extra aggressive stance in opposition to “incentivized opinions.” These happen when corporations provide prospects reductions or freebies in change for opinions, or present incentives to staff whose names are talked about in opinions.
“The workers get their mother, greatest good friend or cousin to submit opinions, mentioning their names,” she stated. “It finally ends up resulting in companies having opinions that are not truly beneficial to our group.”
What’s a pretend overview?
Based on Tripadvisor, it’s “any overview submitted by somebody who’s knowingly submitting biased or non-firsthand content material, in an effort to govern a property’s popularity.”
However there is a greater cause detections are on the rise, she stated.
“Our system is all the time getting higher,” she stated, citing Tripadvisor’s three-pronged course of that depends on auto-detection, human overview and group suggestions.
Some 7% of submissions in 2024 had been auto-rejected earlier than being posted, the report stated. Auto-detections additionally flagged one other 5% of submissions for human overview.
Nonetheless, Tripadvisor’s belief and security workforce finally moderated greater than 4.2 million opinions, amounting to greater than 13% of all submissions in 2024, in accordance with the report.
One other 244,000 opinions had been disputed by members on the third stage of overview, the report confirmed. Of those, some 72% remained on the location, and 28% had been eliminated, it stated.
The way to spot a pretend
Tripadvisor has 4 classes of pretend submissions: boosting, vandalism, member fraud and paid opinions, Foley stated.
There is a false impression that vandalism accounts for many pretend opinions, Foley stated, 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 stated.
This consists of “overview farms,” she stated, including that these authors are sometimes concerned in different sorts of on-line fraud too.
Most paid opinions originate in Asia, Foley stated, although 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, experiences present.
A ‘cat and mouse’ sport
Rooting out pretend opinions is a continuing “cat and mouse” sport, Foley stated. However Tripadvisor is getting higher at detecting them yearly, she stated.
“We’re the primary to confess that we’re by no means going to succeed in absolute perfection,” stated Foley. “We’d 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 overview says, and extra on the way it’s posted, she stated. The corporate makes use of synthetic intelligence and behavioral biometrics to search out patterns, which might detect abnormalities like submission spikes and IP tackle masking makes an attempt.
To catch paid reviewers, Tripadvisor investigators pose as pretend overview brokers, Foley stated. When a foul actor posts their first paid overview, “we’ve got all the knowledge … tons of of knowledge factors related to it,” which the corporate makes use of to construct patterns to determine different opinions submitted by the creator prior to now.
Violators aren’t pulled off the location, however their rankings are penalized for a 12 months, Foley stated. Repeat offenders obtain a pink badge on their itemizing “that claims this property is making an attempt to deceive you,” she stated.
AI opinions: not pretend, however not allowed
Most opinions written by AI will not be pretend, Foley stated, 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 stated.
Nonetheless, the corporate would not permit them — not less than not for now.
In 2024, Tripadvisor eliminated greater than 200,000 opinions that it suspected had been written by AI, in accordance with the corporate’s 2025 transparency report.
“We’ll proceed to watch the tendencies and patterns. However proper now, we simply don’t desire vacationers to come back to TripAdvisor for a sea of sameness.”
