Trustpilot and AllAgents lock horns over accusations of ‘fake reviews’
The spat kicked off after Trustpilot this week revealed plans to get tough with companies who manipulate or misuse its platform.
Estate agency review website AllAgents and its larger counterpart Trustpilot have become embroiled in a war of words after the two platforms locked horns over past accusations of fake or manipulated reviews.
The spat kicked off this week after Trustpilot launched a global initiative which, it says, will see legal and other enforcement action taken against companies who manipulate its platform and reviews.
Trustpilot (above, left) says it has “banned the use of incentives, improved our invitation processes, prevented review information being shared with search engines should companies receive our public warning for guidelines breaches and have continued to provide further ‘Business Transparency’ across all company review pages, allowing everyone to see how individual businesses use their reviews”.
But following these claims, AllAgents CEO Martin McKenzie (above, right) has called for Muhlmann to resign, claiming TrustPilot ‘turned a blind eye for years’ to businesses posting their own positive write-ups on the review site.
“They chose content over authenticity, some might say to the benefit of their brand,” says Mackenzie. “We have been bringing this to their attention for years, yet it got ignored.”
Inaccurate
Trustpilot says previous and current allegations by allAgents over ‘fake reviews’ have proven to be inaccurate and any suggestion that Trustpilot ‘turned a blind eye’ to manipulating or misusing of reviews is untrue.
Mackenzie has now claimed that Trustpilot only took down suspicious reviews after AllAgents instructed its lawyers to prepare legal action in early 2018, and has renewed its calls for Muhlmann to stand down.
Trustpilot’s latest response
“The reviews reported by AllAgents were largely alleged to be defamatory rather than fake, and largely 1 star reviews about AllAgents. These reports were handled in accordance with our usual reporting process at that time, which offered the opportunity to the reviewer to amend their review. In the majority of these particular reviews, the reviewer didn’t respond, following which the reviews were taken offline,” a spokesperson says.
