Fake Reviews Law UK: What the CMA Crackdown Means for Your Marketing

Star ratings sit everywhere in modern marketing: on Google, marketplace listings, product pages and ad copy. For most UK businesses they are one of the cheapest conversion levers available. They are also now closely regulated.

Since April 2025, fake reviews and hidden incentivised reviews have been banned outright in the UK, and the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) can enforce consumer law itself, without going to court first. On 28 September 2026 the CMA updated the timetables on its five live fake reviews investigations, confirming they are ongoing with the next updates due over winter 2026 to 2027. With Black Friday and Christmas review requests about to ramp up, it is a good moment to check how your business collects and shows reviews.

This guide explains the fake reviews law UK businesses now work under, what the CMA is looking at, and a practical checklist for marketing teams. At BlackFire Marketing we run paid media, SEO, social and UGC campaigns that lean on reviews every day, so this is written from the marketing side of the problem.

This is general guidance, not legal advice. If reviews are central to your business model or you have received a letter from the CMA, speak to a qualified solicitor.

What the fake reviews ban actually says

The rules sit in the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (DMCC Act). Its consumer protection provisions came into force on 6 April 2025 and added several review practices to a list of "banned practices", which are treated as automatically unfair. In plain terms, the CMA's guidance (CMA208) says the ban covers three things.

1. Fake reviews

A review that claims to be based on someone's genuine experience but is not. That covers fake positive reviews of your own business and fake negative reviews of a competitor, in any format: text, video, star rating or image. Writing them, posting them or paying someone else to produce them is banned. The CMA's examples include buying reviews generated by bots.

2. Concealed incentivised reviews

A review written in exchange for something, where that fact is not made clear. "Something" is broad. The guidance lists money, commission, discounts or vouchers, free products, free stays and event invitations, and says commissioning can include asking a member of staff to write a review.

Incentivised reviews are not automatically illegal. The CMA says businesses can pay for or reward reviews, but only if the incentive is made clear to readers and the review still reflects the reviewer's genuine experience. The guidance also notes that entering reviewers into a prize draw, where there is no guaranteed benefit, is unlikely to count as commissioning.

3. Misleading review information

This is the part many marketers miss: how you present reviews, not just where they come from. Examples in the guidance include suppressing genuine negative reviews, cherry-picking positive ones, merging reviews from different products to boost a rating, and showing star ratings or review counts that still include reviews you know are fake.

Why fake reviews are in the news now

The CMA has moved from guidance to enforcement in stages.

• April 2025: the ban came into force and the CMA published its fake reviews guidance, followed by a three-month adjustment period.
• July 2025: after that period, the CMA reviewed the websites of more than 100 businesses and wrote to 54 that could be failing to comply, including some with no clear policy on fake or incentivised reviews.
• March 2026: it opened investigations into five businesses: Autotrader and Feefo (whether some moderated 1-star reviews were not published or counted in ratings), Dignity (whether staff were asked to write positive reviews), Just Eat (whether its ratings system inflated some star ratings) and Pasta Evangelists (whether customers were offered discounts for 5-star reviews without this being disclosed).
• September 2026: the CMA updated each case page to say the investigation is ongoing, with the next update expected in winter 2026 to 2027.

The CMA has said it has not reached any conclusions on whether these businesses broke the law. What the cases show is the range of practices in scope: how reviews are obtained, moderated, displayed and turned into star ratings.

The penalties are real. Under the DMCC Act regime the CMA can fine a business up to 10% of global turnover, or £300,000 if that is higher. It has already used these powers in other consumer cases. In June 2026, for example, it fined StubHub UK £889,200 over drip pricing and ordered refunds to more than 50,000 customers.

Who does the fake reviews law apply to?

More businesses than you might think. The CMA's short guide for businesses says it applies to any trader that publishes consumer reviews or review information, including reviews collected by someone else. Publication formats listed include websites, social media, search services, marketplaces, review sites and print.

That means a local trades business embedding Google reviews on its homepage, an ecommerce brand showing product ratings, and a brand reposting customer reviews on social media all have obligations. So do the people producing reviews. The guidance names content creators, influencers and marketing companies alongside traders.

Two points matter for most SMEs:

• You cannot outsource the risk. If a review platform or widget provider moderates your reviews, both of you have responsibilities. The CMA says you can agree for a third party to monitor reviews, but you are still responsible for your own steps.
• Proportionate does not mean optional. What counts as reasonable depends on the volume of reviews, where they come from and how likely fake content is in your sector. A small café needs a lighter process than a marketplace, but it still needs one.

Practices that now carry legal risk

Based on the CMA's guidance and examples, these are the habits we would stop immediately:

• Offering a discount, freebie or refund for a 5-star review, or for changing a negative review
• Asking staff to leave reviews without making the connection clear
• Running "leave a review, get money off" campaigns without labelling the resulting reviews as incentivised
• Buying review packages or "reputation boost" services from third parties
• Only inviting happy customers to review, or switching review invitations on and off depending on how things are going
• Making dispute resolution conditional on a customer not leaving a negative review
• Hiding, delaying or quietly deleting genuine negative reviews
• Showing a star rating on your site or in ads that you know includes fake reviews
• Gifting products to creators for reviews without making sure the content is clearly labelled as advertising

Several of these also break platform rules. Google's Maps user contributed content policy, which covers Google Business Profile reviews, says businesses must not offer incentives for reviews, discourage negative reviews or selectively ask for positive ones. If you rely on local search, our guide to Google Business Profile SEO covers how to build reviews the right way.

A compliance checklist for marketing teams

The CMA's short guide sets out what publishers should have in place. Translated into marketing tasks, it looks like this.

1. Publish a clear reviews policy

Write a short, plain English policy that says fake reviews are not allowed and explains your approach to incentivised reviews. The guidance says it should be easy to find, so link it from wherever reviews appear, not just the footer. If you allow incentivised reviews, say how they will be labelled.

2. Do a simple risk assessment

List where reviews appear (site, marketplaces, Google, social), who can post them, and where fake or incentivised content is most likely to creep in. The guidance says this should be repeated regularly, and especially before you change how you collect or display reviews.

3. Set up detect, investigate and act processes

Decide who checks reviews, what counts as suspicious and what happens next, including updating ratings and review counts once fake reviews are removed. Treat genuine negative reviews as feedback to answer, not content to remove.

4. Audit your review requests

Look at every automated email, SMS, receipt and packaging insert that asks for a review. Ask every customer, not just the happy ones. Do not suggest what they should say. If there is any reward attached, make sure it is disclosed. Simply emailing customers to ask whether they would like to leave a review, without steering the content, is fine under the guidance.

5. Check your ads, landing pages and emails

If you quote ratings or review counts in Google Ads, Meta ads, landing pages or emails, make sure they are current, come from genuine reviews and are not cherry-picked to tell a different story from your overall rating. Our paid media team checks claims like these as part of creative review.

6. Brief creators and UGC partners properly

If you gift products or pay creators for content that reviews your product, the content needs to be clearly labelled as advertising. Put this in the brief and the contract. Our post on influencer contracts in the UK covers disclosure from the creator's side, and our UGC service builds labelling into every brief.

7. Review your suppliers

If a review platform, agency or widget moderates or displays your reviews, ask how they handle fake and negative reviews, and get those responsibilities written into the contract.

Genuine reviews still win, and they convert

None of this means pulling back from reviews. Genuine, recent reviews are still some of the most persuasive content a business owns.

The practical shift is from volume to quality. A steady flow of honest reviews, a visible reply to the occasional bad one and a rating people can trust is a sounder base for conversion and lead quality than a suspiciously perfect 5.0. If you are planning promotions for the Black Friday and Christmas trading period, build your review requests into that plan now.

For SEO, reviews feed local visibility and the trust signals that matter as search becomes more AI-assisted, which we cover in our guide to GEO and AEO for UK SMEs. Our SEO team can help you build a review process into your wider local and organic plan.

FAQ

Yes. Since 6 April 2025, writing, posting or commissioning fake reviews, and publishing incentivised reviews without making the incentive clear, have been banned practices under the DMCC Act. Publishing review information in a misleading way is also banned.

You can, but under the CMA's guidance the incentive must be made clear to readers and the review must still reflect the customer's genuine experience. Some platforms ban incentivised reviews entirely, including Google for Business Profile reviews, so check platform rules too.

The CMA's guidance says traders should not suppress, edit, withhold or remove genuine negative reviews, or discourage customers from leaving them. You should remove reviews that are fake or break your published policy, and update your ratings when you do.

Asking staff to write reviews can be a form of commissioning under the guidance, and reviews from people with a financial or commercial connection need that connection made clear. In most cases it is simpler not to ask staff for reviews at all.

Next step

If reviews play a big part in how you win customers, from Google Business Profile to paid ads and creator content, it is worth making sure every part of the process would stand up to scrutiny. Talk to us about paid media, SEO or social media management, and we will help you build review-driven marketing that converts and stays on the right side of the CMA.