The Clutch Ongoing Commitment to Trustworthy Reviews in 2025

The prevalence of fake reviews has become a growing issue, undermining the credibility of platforms and distorting the reality of the marketplace.

At Clutch, we take our role in fostering transparency and trust very seriously. As a platform that connects businesses with service providers, we recognize the weight that reviews hold in shaping decision-making processes. Unfortunately, there has been a rise of fake reviews in recent years — from 2022 to 2023, the ratio of reviews that Clutch rejected more than doubled. This market-wide trend poses a significant threat to the integrity of the information that buyers use when researching potential service providers. That’s why, in 2024, Clutch invested in new measures to combat this issue and further strengthen our industry-leading review verification. 

This report dives into the prevalence of fake reviews, the substantial impact they have on B2B buyers, and how Clutch’s enhanced Trust & Safety protocols are working to ensure that our platform remains a trusted resource for businesses in search of reliable service providers. 

What Is a Fake Review?

The term “fake review” gets thrown around a lot online, and it can be taken to mean a lot of different things, including:

• Incentivized review (i.e., the reviewer was a real customer but received some sort of compensation to leave a positive review)
• Non-purchaser review (i.e., the reviewer left a review before completing their purchasing process and becoming a customer)
• Overly negative review (i.e., the reviewer was a real customer but the company being reviewed believes that the review misrepresents the actual events that transpired)

At Clutch, we define a fake or falsified review as a review left by someone who is intentionally misrepresenting their identity or relationship with the service provider. 

Another term that is important to define is “review broker,” which refers to people who create and sell fake reviews. Depending on who they’re selling their services to, review brokers can be leaving highly positive reviews for the purchasing company or highly negative reviews on competitors’ online profiles. 

How Fake Reviews Affect B2B Buyers (and Why Clutch Cares)

Fake reviews are a problem in any marketplace, but they are particularly harmful in the B2B space due to the relatively high costs of products and services. For example, a fake review that influences a buyer to purchase a $25 toaster on an e-commerce platform is bad, but the stakes are far higher with a fake review on a B2B marketplace that influences a buyer to invest in a $10,000 software development campaign.

When searching for service providers, decision makers derive immense value from online reviews. Not only can reviews provide a subjective opinion of the quality of a provider’s work, but they often also contain key objective data such as the cost of a project, the scope of the work, or the tech stack used by the provider. 

This is why it is vital that buyers have access to reviews from real customers who have hired a provider — transparent and trustworthy reviews can help buyers be informed and confident that they are choosing a provider who can meet their specific business needs.

Clutch is 100% committed to promoting transparency and trust in the B2B space, and this transparency covers all aspects of our directories and profiles. However, trust between buyers and service providers starts with the provider’s reviews.

Our Investment in Trust and Safety

Since our founding in 2013, Clutch has taken review verification incredibly seriously. Our team lays eyes on every review submitted to our platform to thoroughly assess its authenticity before it is ever published. Additionally, we don’t publish reviews that have an unfair bias or competing interest, such as the reviewer being employed by the service provider. 

However, in 2023, we reinforced our review verification process as we received increasing reports of review brokers trying to sell fake reviews to providers on our platform. This challenge was not unique to Clutch, due to generative AI lowering the barrier to making fake accounts and reviews. 

Since buyers place high value in online reviews during their research, both B2B and B2C marketplaces began to see a rise in suspicious content submissions. To combat this, Clutch created a task force that prevented these reviews from being published. At the start of 2024, we decided to invest in expanding this initiative to a formal Trust & Safety function.

Clutch’s Trust & Safety function is responsible for monitoring review broker trends and working quickly to shut down any tactics that brokers begin to use. This function works closely with other internal teams that help service providers succeed on Clutch. 

However, the function does not directly answer to those teams. This separation allows our Trust & Safety function to be impartial when making rulings about the integrity of our content and ensures that all service providers are treated the same under our Trust & Safety procedures, regardless of their level of engagement with the platform.

Today, we use proprietary internal software that helps our team identify falsified reviews based on the digital footprint of the reviewers, and our tools evolve according to the specific trends that we see on our platform. This enables a best-in-class verification process, strengthened by the detailed information that we collect about each reviewer and project.

How Clutch Catches Fake Reviews

While we can’t discuss the specifics of our verification software in order to protect the integrity of our program, there are a few details that we can share:

• Our verification software evaluates the reviewer’s digital footprint, comparing it to site-wide trends in review submission.
• We compare information from this footprint to the information that the reviewer enters into the review form to see if there are discrepancies that could potentially indicate platform misuse.
• When verifying reviews, we take into consideration the context of the reviewer’s history on Clutch, as well as the service provider’s review collection history.

Clutch editors manually assess every review prior to publication, using a combination of our internal verification software and online research to confirm that the reviewer is a legitimate representative of the reviewing company. Here’s how we act depending on the results of each assessment:

• If we find evidence that the reviewer is falsifying their identity, then the review is never published.
• If we simply can’t confirm the reviewer’s identity or connection to their company, then the review is published, but it doesn’t have a “Verified” badge.
• If we can confirm that the reviewer is who they claim to be and that they are a legitimate representative of their company, then the review will be published with a “Verified” badge on the review card.

Clutch's 2024 Review Data

The impact of the Trust & Safety function is no small feat. As Clutch works tirelessly to enhance its review verification processes, the results highlight the scale and complexity of the task at hand. Maintaining a trustworthy platform requires continuous refinement, and 2024 was a year of significant strides in combating fake reviews. Here’s a look at the data that demonstrates the scope of our commitment to transparency and integrity:

• In 2024, there were over 60,000 reviews submitted to Clutch.
• 15% of reviews submitted to our platform were rejected and were never published due to signs of falsified information.

As we continued to evolve our detection methods, we realized there was even more work at hand to retroactively review past reviews. We performed thorough profile audits and re-vetted older reviews. Consequently, we removed many reviews that had been published originally but do not meet our current Review Guidelines. 

Next Steps for Clutch Verification

Trust is more important than ever in the B2B space — it’s critical that buyers and providers invest in platforms that proactively, manually, and thoroughly verify the content that’s submitted to their site. 

Clutch is committed to continually evolve our systems used for identifying and removing falsified content. As we add more signals to our verification software, we can ensure that review brokers have no method of trying to evade our detection.

We are also continuing to penalize providers who consistently use review brokers to try to boost their online reputation. Providers who are found to violate our Review Guidelines and Terms of Service — which includes soliciting fake reviews — face penalties including: 

• Lowered rankings in Clutch directories
• Losing access to their Clutch profiles

Clutch remains unwavering in its commitment to fostering a transparent and trustworthy B2B marketplace, where the authenticity of reviews is essential for informed purchasing decisions. By safeguarding the integrity of our platform, we help businesses make confident choices, driving long-term success for both buyers and providers. 

In 2025, we are continuing to refine our systems and enforce strict guidelines to uphold the trust that is vital to B2B relationships. Trust is at the core of every successful business connection, and Clutch will always prioritize its protection for our users.

About the Author

Liam Adkison

Liam Adkison is a Senior Lead with Clutch’s Content Operations team. A founding member of the Trust & Safety function at Clutch, Liam leads the development of the technologies and processes that Clutch uses to prevent the publication of fake reviews.

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