When can I flag reviews?
Fair treatment is one of the principles underlying our efforts to build trust with consumers and businesses worldwide. This means our guidelines apply to everyone who uses our platform, and we treat all flagged reviews consistently, regardless of who wrote them. The same fair treatment applies regardless of whether the reviewed business has a claimed profile or uses our paid services.
You can flag a review for the following reasons:
- The review is harmful or illegal:
We do not allow harmful or illegal content and will remove it as soon as we become aware of it. - Hate speech or discrimination:
Content that negatively targets people or a group of people based on who they are, such as their religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, skin color, ancestry, gender, or other identifying factor. - Terrorism:
Content that praises, supports, or represents hate groups, including the promotion of hateful ideologies and the denial of hate crimes. - Threats or violence:
Content that incites or glorifies evil. This includes descriptions and encouragement of violence, threats of violence, offensive behavior, and incitement to self-harm. - Obscenity:
Content containing profanity, disturbing material, explicit adult content, nudity, or pornography. - Defamation:
A false statement about a person or company that damages their reputation and results in significant financial loss.
Remember that expressing an opinion (such as "I didn't like their service") is not defamation, as opinions are not statements of fact. When a review is flagged for harmful or illegal content, it is temporarily disabled while we investigate. We do this to protect everyone and because we are legally required to do so for certain content. If reviews are reported to us for other reasons, we store them online while we investigate to maintain a fair balance between companies and reviewers.
It contains personal information
To ensure the privacy and security of everyone in our community, you can flag a review if it contains someone else's personal information, such as their name, phone number, email address, or photos/videos of others.
We will not remove a review if it contains information available on your Evalueate profile or website, or if the reviewer has included their own personal information in the review.
It contains advertising or promotional content
You can flag a review if it contains advertising or promotional content, as this type of content is often unhelpful and compromises the integrity and reliability of reviews on our platform.
This includes:
- Promoting another company or product unrelated to the reviewer's experience, including unauthorized advertising, links to another company, promotional codes, and calls to action.
- Purely promoting a political, religious, or ethical opinion, including reviews that focus solely on topics trending in the news or on social media, rather than providing feedback on a genuine experience.
- Promoting scams, including financial scams such as "get-rich-quick" schemes, offering incentives for writing reviews, and clickbait content.
- Promoting spam, including nonsense such as random numbers and letters.
- \Promoting misinformation or imitation, including rumors confirmed by authorities as false, claims about pharmaceuticals, and AI-generated content.
- It is not based on a genuine experience.
You can flag a review if you believe it is not based on a genuine experience. Please note that a review can be genuine even if you don't recognize the reviewer or have specific information about them in your records, such as:
- Anyone with a genuine experience can leave a review at any time.
- Genuine experiences aren't limited to purchases.
- Reviewers don't need to be invited to leave a review.
- Reviewers can choose to use a username that isn't their real name.
As long as the review reflects a genuine experience with your business, we allow it on the platform. We won't remove a review simply because it mentions another business or compares your business to a competitor.
When a review is reported to us for one or more of the reasons mentioned above, we will, unless otherwise required by law, run it through our detection software. This software looks at various data points about the review and, if it appears suspicious, we remove it. We use this additional analysis instead of immediately taking the review offline and automatically asking reviewers to provide evidence that their review is authentic. This is a fairer process that helps us ensure more authentic reviews remain on the platform.
If you believe we made the wrong decision, you can respond and tell us why. We will then have our Content Integrity team manually review the decision. For example, if the review refers to a product you don't sell, or a location of your business that doesn't exist, this could indicate that it isn't based on an authentic experience. By including these details in your response, you help our Content Integrity team investigate the decision. We believe this process benefits businesses by increasing trust, giving you more say in why you believe a review is inauthentic, and reducing your risk of regulatory scrutiny arising from attempts to discredit or conceal genuine customer feedback. Depending on our Content Integrity team's assessment of a disputed review, if it is deemed suspicious, we will request documentation from the reviewer. Until then, and if we cannot confirm a violation of the guidelines, the review will remain online.