Tripadvisor Caught More Than 1 Million Fake Reviews Last Year — Here's How to Spot Them

It’s not always easy to spot a fake review, but there are some tips travelers can use to determine whether or not what they are reading is genuine.

Tripadvisor caught more than 1 million fake reviews last year, and it was able to stop the majority of them from being posted.

The site identified more than 1.3 million fake or fraudulent reviews in 2022, according to the company, which amounted to about 4.4 percent of all reviews submitted. Of those, Tripadvisor stopped 72 percent of them from ever making it onto the website, which the company called a “significant improvement” compared to 2020 when only 67 percent were stopped.

The new data was revealed as part of Tripadvisor’s 2023 Review Transparency report.

"Tripadvisor is built on trust, and we will never stop improving our systems to ensure our community has access to reliable content and the businesses listed can compete on a level playing field," Becky Foley, the vice president for trust and safety at Tripadvisor, said in a statement. "The findings from this report show that our approach is working; we're catching a higher proportion of fraudulent content before it is published, with nearly three-quarters of fake reviews never even making it to the platform."

Of the fake reviews detected last year, just over 24,500 of them were associated with paid review companies. And nearly half of those originated in six countries: India, Russia, the United States, Turkey, Italy, and Vietnam.

A review is considered fake if it was “submitted by someone who is either biased in some way and/or who did not have a personal experience with the business they reviewed,” according to the company.

It’s not always easy to spot a fake review, but there are some tips travelers can use to determine whether or not what they're reading is genuine, like looking for reviews that are recent, first-hand, relevant, respectful, and unbiased.

Beyond fake reviews, Tripadvisor has removed reviews for a variety of reasons, including profane language, technical issues like excessively repeated characters, and irrelevant commentary.

For more Travel & Leisure news, make sure to sign up for our newsletter!

Read the original article on Travel & Leisure.