Around 8% of the 31.1 million reviews submitted to Tripadvisor in 2024 were fake, in response to the corporate’s “Transparency Report 2025.”
That is greater than twice the number detected in 2022, in response to company reports.
But that doesn’t suggest the number of pretend reviews on the location doubled, said Becky Foley, vp and head of trust and safety at Tripadvisor.
While submissions to the web site increased, Tripadvisor’s policies on fake reviews also modified, she said, citing the corporate’s more aggressive stance against “incentivized reviews.” These occur when firms offer customers discounts or freebies in exchange for reviews, or provide incentives to employees whose names are mentioned in reviews.
“The staff get their mom, best friend or cousin to submit reviews, mentioning their names,” she said. “It finally ends up resulting in businesses having reviews that are not actually beneficial to our community.”
What’s a fake review?
In keeping with Tripadvisor, it’s “any review submitted by someone who’s knowingly submitting biased or non-firsthand content, in an effort to govern a property’s popularity.”
But there’s an even bigger reason detections are on the rise, she said.
“Our system is all the time recovering,” she said, citing Tripadvisor’s three-pronged process that relies on auto-detection, human review and community feedback.
Some 7% of submissions in 2024 were auto-rejected before being posted, the report said. Auto-detections also flagged one other 5% of submissions for human review.
Nonetheless, Tripadvisor’s trust and safety team ultimately moderated greater than 4.2 million reviews, amounting to greater than 13% of all submissions in 2024, in response to the report.
One other 244,000 reviews were disputed by members on the third stage of review, the report showed. Of those, some 72% remained on the location, and 28% were removed, it said.
Easy methods to spot a fake
Tripadvisor has 4 categories of pretend submissions: boosting, vandalism, member fraud and paid reviews, Foley said.
There is a misconception that vandalism accounts for many fake reviews, Foley said, adding that boosting (54%) and member fraud (39%) have long made up the majority of those reviews.
Paid reviews (4.8%) are a smaller but “more pernicious” category of fakes, she said.
This includes “review farms,” she said, adding that these authors are sometimes involved in other kinds of online fraud too.
Most paid reviews originate in Asia, Foley said, though only 17% of real submissions got here from the continent last yr.
In 2024, greater than one-third of all paid submissions detected by Tripadvisor got here from Indonesia and Vietnam, while in 2022 most paid reviews got here from India, reports show.
A ‘cat and mouse’ game
Rooting out fake reviews is a continuing “cat and mouse” game, Foley said. But Tripadvisor is recovering at detecting them yearly, she said.
“We’re the primary to confess that we’re never going to succeed in absolute perfection,” said Foley. “We won’t catch [a fake] the primary time, but we’ll catch it will definitely.”
Tripadvisor uses its own technology, developed over 25 years, to flush out fakes — a system that increasingly relies less on what a review says, and more on the way it’s posted, she said. The corporate uses artificial intelligence and behavioral biometrics to search out patterns, which may detect abnormalities like submission spikes and IP address masking attempts.
To catch paid reviewers, Tripadvisor investigators pose as fake review brokers, Foley said. When a nasty actor posts their first paid review, “we have now all of the info … tons of of knowledge points related to it,” which the corporate uses to construct patterns to discover other reviews submitted by the creator up to now.
Violators aren’t pulled off the location, but their rankings are penalized for a yr, Foley said. Repeat offenders receive a red badge on their listing “that claims this property is attempting to deceive you,” she said.
AI reviews: not fake, but not allowed
Most reviews written by AI are usually not fake, Foley said, calling that “considered one of the myths I like to bust.”
Most are written by regular travelers that use the technology to make their writing more polished, she said.
Still, the corporate doesn’t allow them — a minimum of not for now.
In 2024, Tripadvisor removed greater than 200,000 reviews that it suspected were written by AI, in response to the corporate’s 2025 transparency report.
“We’ll proceed to observe the trends and patterns. But at once, we just don’t desire travelers to return to TripAdvisor for a sea of sameness.”
