Online reviews have always mattered to small businesses. For many customers, a quick look at your star rating is part of deciding whether to get in touch.
Since 6 April 2025, the rules around those reviews have become much stricter. Under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, fake reviews and several related practices are now automatically illegal in the UK. And in March 2026, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) opened its first investigations into five businesses over fake and misleading reviews.
You don’t need to have bought fake reviews to be affected. The law also covers how you collect, display and manage reviews, including the ones customers leave on your own website. Here’s what that means in practice, and what to check this week.
What the Law Now Bans
The CMA’s fake reviews guidance explains the rules in detail. In summary, it’s now banned to:
- Write, buy or commission fake reviews. A fake review is one that isn’t based on a genuine experience. That includes reviews written by staff, friends or family posing as customers, reviews bought from third parties and reviews generated by AI tools.
- Publish incentivised reviews without saying so. If someone was given a discount, freebie or entry into a prize draw in exchange for a review, that needs to be clearly disclosed.
- Present reviews in a misleading way. For example, only showing your positive reviews, hiding negative ones or displaying a star rating that doesn’t reflect what customers actually said.
Fake reviews can be negative as well as positive. Posting false negative reviews about a competitor falls under the same rules.
The CMA can now decide for itself whether these rules have been broken and issue fines of up to 10% of a business’s global turnover. That’s a big change from the past, when enforcement usually meant going through the courts.
The Part Most Small Businesses Miss
There’s also a positive duty in the law. If you publish consumer reviews, you’re expected to take reasonable and proportionate steps to prevent and remove fake and misleading ones.
That doesn’t only apply to big review platforms. If your website has a testimonials page, a reviews widget, product reviews on your online shop or a “What our customers say” section on your homepage, you’re publishing reviews.
“Reasonable and proportionate” depends on your size and how many reviews you handle. A local electrician with a dozen testimonials isn’t expected to have the same systems as a national marketplace. But you are expected to have thought about it and to act when something looks wrong.
Common Habits That Could Now Cause Problems
Most small businesses aren’t deliberately trying to mislead anyone. The risk usually comes from well-meant habits that have been around for years.
“Leave us a review and get 10% off your next order.” Offering an incentive isn’t automatically banned under the DMCC Act, but the resulting reviews must be clearly marked as incentivised. On top of that, platforms have their own rules. Google, for example, doesn’t allow businesses to offer incentives for reviews on their Business Profile at all.
Asking the team to “get things started”. A new business with no reviews might be tempted to ask employees or friends to leave a few. If those people aren’t genuine customers, or if they don’t disclose their connection to the business, that’s a problem.
Only displaying the best testimonials. Choosing a few quotes for your homepage is normal. But if you present a curated selection as representative of all your feedback, or display a “5-star rated” badge that ignores your lower reviews, it can be misleading.
Filtering reviews before they’re published. Some review tools let you approve reviews before they go live. Using that to remove spam is sensible. Using it to quietly hold back genuine negative reviews is not.
Using a review-gathering tool that only asks happy customers. Some systems send a “How did we do?” message first and only direct people who answer positively to your public review page. This kind of filtering can make your overall rating look better than your customers’ real experience.
Is your homepage turning visitors into customers?
Use our free Homepage Conversion Checklist to quickly identify messaging, trust, UX and conversion issues. These issues could be costing you enquiries.
What to Do Now: A Simple Review Check
You don’t need a legal department to get this right. For most small businesses, these steps will go a long way.
Write a short review policy. Explain that you don’t allow fake reviews, how you handle incentivised reviews, and how people can report a review they think is fake. Publish it somewhere easy to find, such as your reviews page or footer. The CMA highlights having a clear policy as one of the key steps businesses should take.
Audit the reviews on your own website. Look at your testimonials page, widgets and product reviews. Can you trace each one back to a genuine customer? If not, consider removing it.
Check how your rating is calculated. If you display an average star rating or a review count, make sure it includes all genuine reviews, not just the good ones, and that it’s kept up to date.
Review your review requests. Look at the emails, texts or cards you use to ask for reviews. Are you offering an incentive? Are you only asking customers you expect to be happy? Adjust anything that could skew the results.
Brief your team. Make sure everyone knows they shouldn’t review the business themselves, ask friends to do it, or post reviews about competitors.
Keep a simple record. If you remove a review because you believe it’s fake, note when and why. If questions are ever asked, it shows you took reasonable steps.
Turn Honest Reviews Into an Advantage
It’s easy to see all of this as a compliance headache. But there’s an upside.
Customers are getting better at spotting reviews that feel too polished or too perfect. A profile with a 4.7 rating, a mix of detailed comments and thoughtful replies to the occasional complaint often looks more believable than a wall of identical five-star reviews.
How you respond to a negative review can also say a lot about your business. A calm, helpful reply shows future customers what it’s like to deal with you when something goes wrong.
Genuine reviews are part of your reputation, and as we’ve written before, your website is part of your reputation too. They’re also a big part of why your Google Business Profile can work harder than your homepage. And because trust is built on evidence rather than claims, honest reviews support the same goals we discussed in EEAT as word-of-mouth at scale.
The Takeaway
Fake reviews are no longer just a reputational risk. They’re a legal one, and the CMA has started enforcing the rules.
For most small businesses, staying on the right side of the law isn’t complicated. Collect reviews honestly, disclose incentives, display feedback fairly and have a simple process for dealing with anything suspicious.
Do that, and your reviews will do what they’re supposed to do: help genuine customers make a confident decision.
This article is general guidance, not legal advice. For questions about your specific circumstances, the CMA’s guidance is the authoritative source, and a solicitor specialising in consumer law can help.
Action Step: Your 15-Minute Review Audit
- List every place your website shows reviews or testimonials.
- Check that each one comes from a genuine customer.
- Look at how you ask for reviews and whether you offer incentives.
- Make sure any star rating you display reflects all genuine feedback.
- Draft a short review policy and add it to your website.
If anything on that list makes you hesitate, that’s the place to start.
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