Content & Media
How many fake reviews are posted every day?
Around three in ten online reviews are fake, and the platforms know it: Google removed 292 million policy-violating Maps reviews in 2025 alone, and Amazon blocked 275 million in 2024. Businesses buy them to inflate their own stars or to sink a competitor, from paid review farms and increasingly from AI. Consumer harm is estimated at $770 billion globally. The FTC banned fake reviews outright in 2024. Every major platform is fighting them, and none has won.
Roughly 18.2 reviews every second.
Source: Google 2025 Trust & Safety Report; Amazon Transparency Report 2025; Fakespot/Mozilla; FTC rulemaking record.
Last checked: 18 October 2026
How fake reviews affect your everyday purchasing decisions
93% of consumers say reviews influence their purchasing decisions, and nearly 70% trust them as much as a personal recommendation. That is what makes fake reviews worth buying. The manipulation works because real social proof is genuinely useful, which means fabricated social proof is hard to dismiss on sight.
Fakespot, now part of Mozilla, found that 31% of Amazon reviews looked unreliable in its 2023 analysis. When you filter for "4 stars and above," a meaningful share of what comes up has been artificially elevated. You are spending real money based on manufactured consensus.
The hardest-hit categories are supplements, electronics accessories, beauty products, and budget clothing: exactly the ones where inspection before purchase is impossible. If a product has thousands of five-star reviews and no negative ones, that pattern is information. Uniform enthusiasm is not normal.
The scale: nearly half a million fake reviews posted today alone
Amazon blocked 275 million suspected fake reviews in 2024 (Amazon, Trustworthy Shopping), up from 250M in 2023
Capital One Shopping ResearchGoogle blocked or removed 240 million policy-violating Maps reviews in 2024, up about 40% year-on-year (Google Maps safety report)
Capital One Shopping ResearchGoogle's 2025 Trust & Safety Report: 292 million policy-violating Maps reviews blocked or removed, up 21% year-on-year, alongside more than 1 billion legitimate reviews published in the same year
GoogleCapital One Shopping 2025: ~30% of all online reviews are fake or ungenuine; consumer harm estimated at $770.7B globally in 2025
Capital One Shopping ResearchIn 2024, the FTC issued its first formal rule explicitly banning fake consumer reviews and insider testimonials (FTC rulemaking record, cited by Fakespot)
FakespotFakespot analysis: 31% of Amazon reviews may be unreliable
FakespotFake reviews influence an estimated $152 billion in annual US consumer spending, per FTC 2024 rulemaking record compiled by Fakespot
FakespotAI-generated fake reviews grew dramatically after 2022, becoming increasingly hard to detect
FakespotPlatform crackdowns and regulatory responses: a timeline
- 2014Amazon bans incentivised reviews, except through its own Vine program
- 2016Amazon sues 1,114 Fiverr sellers of paid fake reviews
- 2019FTC announces rulemaking on fake reviews (ANPR Oct 2022, proposed rule June 2023); Yelp, Trustpilot, Google all report large fake review removal campaigns
- 2024FTC issues formal final rule banning fake consumer reviews, first explicit regulatory prohibition
- 2025Google blocks or removes 292M policy-violating Maps reviews, up 21% year-on-year, per its 2025 Trust & Safety Report
Fake review volume: from a niche problem to a systemic one
Fake review volumes grew steadily through the 2010s and accelerated sharply from 2022, as AI language models made it trivial to generate convincing product reviews at industrial scale with minimal effort.
| Year | Rate | Est. per day | Context |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 23K/hr | 548K | AI-assisted fake review generation begins |
| 2024 | 60K/hr | 1M | FTC rule issued; first year with combined cross-platform detection data |
| 2025 | 66K/hr | 2M | Google's Maps enforcement climbs 21% year-on-year; other platforms carried forward at latest published figures (*2024) |
| 2027 (forecast) | 29K/hr | 685K | AI-generated reviews commoditised; detection arms race |
Fake reviews vs. fake news: two parallel crises of fabricated content
Both exploit the same mechanism: volume and repetition standing in for genuine evidence. Fake reviews corrupt purchasing decisions; fake news corrupts beliefs. AI has lowered the cost of both to near zero.
Fake reviews: how the $152 billion opinion economy is being manipulated
A multi-billion-dollar manipulation industry
Review farms in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe sell convincing-looking reviews at scale. Merchants swap positive ratings with each other, incentivised programmes blur the line between paid and organic, and AI now generates thousands of contextually appropriate reviews per hour at near-zero cost. The tactic works because 93% of buyers check reviews before purchasing, which makes the pool of trust worth contaminating. Every fake review that slips through erodes the value of every real one.
The AI inflection point
Before 2022, generating convincing fake reviews at scale required low-paid human labour, which kept volumes roughly bounded by cost. Generative AI removed that constraint. Models now produce thousands of contextually appropriate, stylistically varied reviews per hour for close to nothing. Platform detection algorithms from Amazon, Yelp, and others are locked in an arms race with generation tools, and the generation side has been winning. The FTC's 2024 rule creates a legal deterrent, but enforcement against offshore operators is limited, and AI lowers evasion costs at the same rate platforms raise detection costs.
Detection research: how platforms and academics fight fake reviews
| Year | Finding | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | FTC announces advance notice of proposed rulemaking on fake reviews and deceptive endorsements (October 2022) | regulatory milestone | Fakespot |
| 2021 | Amazon: 200M+ fake reviews removed in 2021; launches brand transparency tools | 200M fake reviews removed (Amazon, 2021) | Fakespot |
| 2023 | Amazon: 250M+ fake reviews blocked; Fakespot finds 31% of reviews unreliable on the platform | 250M fake reviews removed (Amazon, 2023) | Fakespot |
| 2024 | Amazon: 275M fake reviews blocked; Google: 240M removed; Trustpilot: 4.5M; TripAdvisor: 2.7M — combined ~522M detected across major platforms in 2024 | 522M fake reviews removed across platforms (2024) | Capital One Shopping Research |
| 2024 | FTC issues formal rule banning fake reviews; AI-generated reviews increasingly prevalent | regulatory milestone | Fakespot |
| 2025 | Google's 2025 Trust & Safety Report: 292M policy-violating Maps reviews blocked or removed, up 21% year-on-year; Amazon 275M (2024, latest published), Trustpilot 4.5M, TripAdvisor 2.7M — combined ~574M across major platforms | 574M fake reviews removed across platforms (2025) |
In perspective
About 18 fake reviews are removed per second across the major platforms: Amazon, Google, Trustpilot, and TripAdvisor. That is the confirmed floor; actual creation runs higher.
If someone read every fake review Amazon and Google removed in 2025 at one per minute, it would take over 1,000 years non-stop.
Google blocked or removed 292 million policy-violating Maps reviews in 2025. Add Amazon's 275 million and the combined total exceeds the combined population of the United States and Japan.
Frequently asked questions
- How many fake reviews are posted per day?
- Estimates vary. Amazon removed 275 million fake reviews in 2024; Google blocked 292 million Maps reviews in 2025. Combined across Amazon, Google, Trustpilot, and TripAdvisor, about 574 million were detected and removed in the latest reported years (2024-2025), which works out to around 1.57 million per day. Actual creation runs higher: platforms detect an average of 6.9% of reviews as suspicious, meaning most fakes are never caught.
- What percentage of reviews are fake?
- Platform data and independent analysis suggest 15-30% of reviews on major e-commerce sites may be inauthentic. Fakespot (acquired by Mozilla in 2023, shut down in July 2025) found 31% of Amazon reviews were unreliable in a 2023 analysis. Capital One Shopping's 2025 report puts the global share at around 30%.
- What is the economic impact of fake reviews?
- The FTC's 2024 rulemaking record puts fake reviews at influencing over $152 billion in annual US consumer spending. Capital One Shopping's 2025 report estimates global consumer harm at $770 billion. Businesses that buy fake reviews gain an unfair advantage; competitors that do not, lose one.
Cite this rate
AnythingCounter derived rate, last checked October 2026: about 65,500 reviews per hour (about 1.6 million reviews per day).
Method: Based on Google 2026; Capital One Shopping Research 2025; Fakespot 2024, converted to a per-hour rate (daily total ÷ 24).
Suggested citation: AnythingCounter, "Fake reviews posted," October 2026, https://anythingcounter.com/fake-reviews-per-day
Primary source: Google; Capital One Shopping Research; Fakespot.
How this number is calculated, and how much to trust it
Google blocked or removed 292 million policy-violating Maps reviews in 2025, up 21% year-on-year (Google 2025 Trust & Safety Report), while also publishing over 1 billion legitimate reviews. Amazon blocked 275 million suspected fake reviews in 2024 (Amazon, Trustworthy Shopping), the latest figure Amazon has published. Trustpilot: 4.5M removed (7% of platform) in 2024. TripAdvisor: 2.7M in 2024. Combined from four platforms: ~574M detected/removed per year. 574,200,000 ÷ 8,760 hr ≈ 65,500/hr; ÷ 3,600 ≈ 18.2/sec. These are confirmed detected/removed reviews used as a proxy for creation volume. Actual fake reviews posted (including undetected) is higher: Capital One Shopping 2025 estimates platforms remove an average of 6.9% of reviews as suspicious, implying undetected fakes dwarf confirmed removals.
These are platform-reported blocks and removals, not independent counts; Amazon describes its figure as suspected fake reviews blocked before publication. Total fake review creation is higher: Capital One Shopping's 2025 research estimates platforms detect an average of 6.9% of reviews as suspicious, putting actual creation well above the confirmed floor. Fakespot, which Mozilla shut down in July 2025, supplied the 31% unreliability rate for Amazon. FTC economic impact data comes from the agency's 2024 rulemaking record.
Sources: see below. More detail on our methodology page.
Sources
Fakespot - Fake Review Analysis - Capital One Shopping Research – Fake Review Statistics 2025/2026 (Amazon: 275M blocked in 2024; Google: 240M removed; ~30% of reviews fake globally; $770.7B consumer harm in 2025) - Google - 2025 Trust & Safety Report (Maps): 292 million policy-violating reviews blocked or removed, up 21% year-on-year.
Worth a look... Fake news shared - AI-generated news - Online scam victims.