Shopping on the Internet is easier than ever with a plethora of ecommerce outlets likeAmazonand social media even integrating shopping extensions. However, it’s also harder than it’s ever been to spot fake products. Between social media influencers' strong verbiage when describing relatively mundane devices, fake reviews making Amazon products lookwayhigher quality, and the plethora of copycat products out there, it can be difficult to discern which ones are good. Online reviews can help, but there are so many and no site covers every product.
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That said, I like to use Fakespot, which is an online tool that can tell you if consumer reviews about a product are likely to be fake or real. This is especially helpful on Amazon, where fake reviews are commonplace. While it can’t tell you if a product is good or bad, at least it can remove one of the variables. Here’s more about Fakespot and how it works.
What is Fakespot?
Fakespotis an online tool that boasts the ability to weed out scams, fake reviews, and reduce the impact of misinformation in consumer product reviews. It’s run by Mozilla, the same company that develops Firefox browser. It was founded in 2016 and purchased by Mozilla in 2023. In addition to the official website, the service offers browser extensions for both Firefox, Google Chrome, and Chromium-based browsers like Microsoft Edge.
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At its core, it uses AI and machine learning to detect patterns in reviews that may qualify them as fake. Fakespot then gives the entire product a grade from A to F.
Products graded with an A or B mean the consumer reviews are mostly legitimate and there’s a low chance of running into a fake review. Consequently, D and F scores mean most of the reviews are likely faked.
How to use Fakespot
There are two main ways to use Fakespot. We’ll briefly go through both of them.
First option: Using the official website
Second option: Using FakeSpot’s extension
While there are extensions for multiple browsers, they work the same regardless of the browser you use.
How to interpret Fakespot’s results
Fakespot gives you quite a lot of information. Fortunately, it’s broken down into five total sections.
Get the grade early
The first section shows you the product, the link to the product page, and the aforementioned letter grade. In addition, there is a Fakespot Adjusted Rating that guesses what the rating might be if the false reviews were removed, but that feature is a bit hit or miss.
A smart way to find pros and cons
The second section details the product’s pros and cons. The AI model analyzes the page and also groups together what people most often said they liked and disliked about the product in question. Amazon does something similar to this now with its own AI, although Amazon doesn’t filter out fake reviews first.
Highlight reel
Next is the Highlights section, which is similar to the Pros & Cons section. It takes the keywords it finds most often and puts them into easy-to-read lists. Thus, if a lot of people say they like the sound quality of a pair of earbuds, the Highlights section will mention sound quality as a highlight.
A smart summary
Fourth is the Overview section. This is where you see additional details about Fakespot’s analysis. Notably, this is where the website gives you a guesstimate of how many of the reviews it believes are real, how much deception was used, how many reviews the product has in total, and some keywords that real reviewers often use to describe the product.
A beta version of further analysis
The final section is Helpful Insights, which at the time of writing, is in beta testing. This shows some bits of reviews that the AI thinks will be helpful in your search. Additionally, it houses a graph of the number of reviews over time as well as a price history graph.
Does a poor Fakespot score mean a product is bad?
No, and Fakespot makes it a point to say this multiple times on their website. All Fakespot does is review the reviews, not the product itself. Let’s look at an example. In the above image, you’re able to see the Torras Strong stand case for the SamsungGalaxy S24 Ultrahas an F rating, meaning that there is a high level of deception involved.
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As I’m writing this article, all the reviews have been posted between Jan. 19 and Jan. 23. No one who posted a review for this product has the S24 Ultra yet, as even the earliest pre-orders are set to arrive on Jan. 26. How does anyone know how durable the kickstand is over the long-term or how much protection the case offers if no one’s even put a phone in it yet?
As an owner of the previous generation Torras case for theGalaxy S23 Ultra, I know that, so far, the only notable difference between the cases is that my S23 iteration doesn’t have a MagSafe magnet. Its review score is a B, as noted in the image above. The case is pretty nice. I’ve had mine as long as I’ve owned my S23 Ultra and I can attest that it is, in fact, a good product.
The point is that unreliable or fake review scores are only one part of the equation. Companies can release perfectly good products and also put up fake (or early) reviews. Approximatelyone-third of all shopperswon’t buy a product with no reviews. It’s also been shown that positive reviews increase sales and that even one review can increase the likelihood of a sale. Fake reviews are a marketing tactic, albeit a fairly scummy one.
How is Fakespot useful?
Fakespot is ultimately a tool that compiles and presents data. Like any such tool, it’s all about correctly interpreting that data. If you look at a product that has an A or a B rating, then you can assume that it’s safe to go to that product page and read through the customer reviews to help you make your purchasing decision. You are, after all, reading real reviews from real people most of the time.
For products that have a C, D, or F rating, it’s low-hanging fruit to say that the reviews aren’t reliable or that the data isn’t useful. It’s much more productive to view such reviews as decorative, like a showroom floor of sorts. Those reviews are what the company wants you to see, which can still be useful in some cases. Of course, you’ll want to corroborate anything you see with professional online reviews, Reddit, and other, more trustworthy outlets.
