Trustpilot Hit With €4 Million Fine in Italy Over Misleading Reviews & Ratings

Key Takeaways

• Misleading Review Integrity: The Authority found Trustpilot failed to adequately verify the authenticity of reviews, including those labeled as verified.
• Selective Review Invitations: Businesses could choose which customers to invite, raising concerns about whether ratings reflect a full and unbiased customer base.
• Transparency Gaps: Consumers were not given sufficient information about platform operations or the influence of paid services.
• Dark Pattern Concerns: Interface design choices contributed to misleading user experiences.

Deep Dive

Italy’s competition authority has fined Trustpilot €4 million, concluding that the widely used review platform misled consumers through how it collected, labeled, and presented ratings.

The decision cuts to a question that has quietly followed the rise of online review platforms for years. When a consumer sees a star rating, what are they actually looking at? According to the regulator, not always a fair reflection of real customer experience.

The investigation found that Trustpilot did not carry out adequate checks to ensure that reviews on its platform were authentic. That concern extended even to reviews marked as “verified,” a label that carries an implicit promise of reliability.

In practice, the Authority determined that those assurances were not consistently backed by sufficient controls. The result was a system where consumers could be led to place confidence in ratings that had not been rigorously validated.

That gap between perception and reality became a central issue in the case.

How Review Collection Shapes the Outcome

The regulator also zeroed in on how reviews are gathered in the first place.

Trustpilot offers businesses tools to invite customers to leave feedback, promoted as a way to improve transparency and reduce misleading content. But those same tools, the Authority found, allow businesses to decide which customers receive those invitations.

That flexibility may seem operationally convenient. From a regulatory standpoint, it creates a different problem.

If only a subset of customers is asked to provide feedback, the resulting ratings risk reflecting a curated slice of experience rather than the full picture. The Authority concluded that this undermines the overall representativeness of the scores consumers rely on.

What Consumers Weren’t Told

Beyond the mechanics of reviews, the Authority pointed to broader transparency issues.

Consumers were not given clear access to key information about how the platform functions, including the role of paid services used by businesses featured on Trustpilot. Nor were they fully informed about factors that could influence how reviews are collected and displayed.

For a platform built on the premise of trust, those omissions mattered.

The regulator found that these gaps limited consumers’ ability to properly assess the credibility of the ratings in front of them.

Design Choices Under Scrutiny

The decision also highlighted the use of interface design techniques commonly described as dark patterns. These design approaches can steer user behavior or obscure important context, often without users realizing it.

In this case, the Authority determined that such techniques contributed to an overall misleading commercial practice, reinforcing the impression of reliability while key details remained unclear.

The ruling concludes that Trustpilot’s conduct breached multiple provisions of Italy’s Consumer Code governing unfair and misleading practices. But the message extends beyond a single enforcement action.

As regulators continue to examine how digital platforms shape consumer decision-making, scrutiny is shifting from individual pieces of content to the systems that produce and present them. Labels like “verified,” ranking algorithms, and review collection methods are no longer seen as neutral features. They are part of the product, and increasingly, part of the regulatory perimeter.

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