The new rules on fake and misleading consumer reviews came into force on 6 April 2025 under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. The changes impact a broad range of businesses including e-commerce websites, online intermediaries, and influencers. 

Listen to Simon Jupp and Oz Watson discuss the new rules here: 

The update covers consumer reviews, whether of products, services, digital content or traders, whether online or off, whether of a business's own practices or another's, and whether applying to the practice itself or matters such as delivery after-sales service. Text, speech, graphic symbols, aggregated data, stars and rankings are all in scope.

The legislation applies to, among others, reviews on a businesses' own website (even if just thumbs up or down), reviews in print advertising and in marketing letters, product reviews on video sharing platforms and star ratings provided by search engines. 

What practices are banned?

• Submitting/commissioning. The rules impose a ban on submitting or commissioning the publication of a fake consumer review or a concealed incentivised review. Commissioning includes incentivising by any means. 
• Publishing. The rules impose a ban on publishing consumer reviews, or consumer review information, in a misleading way, 'publishing' includes disseminating, or otherwise making available, by any means and includes 
  (i) not publishing/removing, or giving greater prominence to, negative consumer reviews whilst publishing positive ones (or vice versa)
  (ii) omitting relevant information eg that a review has been commissioned.
• Positive obligation. The rules also impose a ban on publishing consumer reviews, or consumer review information, without taking such reasonable and proportionate steps as are necessary for the purposes of preventing the publication or removal from publication of
  (i) fake consumer reviews
  (ii) concealed incentivised reviews
  (iii) consumer review information that is false or misleading.
  
  Examples include 
  (i) porting reviews from one product to another
  (ii) cherry picking positive reviews and supressing negative ones
  (iii) failing to update a star rating when reviews have been identified and removed as fake
  (iv) not disclosing that a review is incentivised or giving comparable weight to incentivised and non-incentivised reviews.
• Offering/facilitating. There are also rules covering various practices relating to facilitating or offering to do the above.

What's the impact on publishers?

For publishers, the new act is easy to breach, practices such as spotlighting a five-star review when the average review rating is lower than five stars would be considered misleading. Positive steps will be needed, and inaction will not be an option. All publishers must have a published policy, conduct regular risk assessments and take other appropriate steps (eg detection, investigation and sanctions).

What's the impact on influencer marketing? 

Incentivised reviews are legal, but such reviews must not be concealed or misleading and therefore the labelling of incentivised reviews will now be required. Mixing incentivised and non-incentivised reviews to form a star rating will likely to be considered misleading. Reviews should also represent a consumer's genuine experience (or they are considered fake). We expect that these changes may impact influencer marketing.

What are the sanctions?

There is now the potential for fines of up to £300,000 or 10% of worldwide turnover, if higher, for breaches of the Act.

What are the key definitions?

• Consumer review: a review of a product, a trader or any other matter relevant to a transactional decision.
• Fake consumer review: a consumer review that purports to be, but is not, based on a person’s genuine experience.
• Consumer review information: information that is derived from, or is influenced by, consumer reviews (such as aggregated data, stars and rankings).
• Concealed incentivised review: commissioning a person to submit or write an incentivised review and not making that fact apparent. Incentives include money, commissions, discounts, 'freebies', free stays etc. 

What are the actions to take now? 

The new rules apply from 6 April 2025, however, the CMA has recognised that businesses will need time for the new rules to bed in and has said that, for the first three months of the new regime, it will focus on supporting businesses with their compliance efforts rather than enforcement. It has also said that early enforcement action will focus on the most egregious breaches.

Immediately, the key actions to take include to:

• identify responsible employee and employees/practices affected
• conduct a risk assessment
• draft/update your consumer reviews policy
• update other policies, processes and technology taking a safety by design approach
• make necessary changes to website, marketing materials etc
• consider impact on influencer marketing and marketing practices for engaging with influencers 
• train marketing and other teams
• watch what the CMA/regulators/ASA are doing to help guide practices. 

For more, see Fake reviews: are you ready for the new rules?