How a review ends up on trustmark.site

1. Submitting a review

A review always belongs to an existing business profile. You choose 1 to 5 stars, enter a name of up to 80 characters and describe your experience in 10 to 2,000 characters. You can do this with or without an account. With an account, you can later see the status of your own reviews.

To limit abuse, there are limits on the number of reviews per visitor and for the platform as a whole within a given period. A form that is accidentally submitted twice is only recorded once.

For some businesses, you can have your text rewritten with AI writing help. You see the suggestion first and decide yourself whether to use it. Nothing is ever posted automatically.

2. Waiting for review

After you submit it, your review has the status ‘awaiting review’. It is not yet public and does not count towards scores. During this period, an administrator of trustmark.site (Linktool B.V.) or the verified manager of the business profile can:

• approve and publish it;
• mark it as checked, after which it still waits for publication;
• reject it, with a written reason of at least 10 characters.

The verified manager of a business profile can receive an email notification about a new review of their business.

3. Automatic publication

If a review is not approved or rejected during the waiting period, the system publishes it automatically. This check runs every hour.

• Reviews with 4 or 5 stars: after 48 hours.
• Reviews with 1, 2 or 3 stars: after 14 days.

With a lower rating, the business gets more time to read the experience, get in touch and, if possible, offer a solution. A low rating alone is not a reason to reject a review. Automatic publication also means that not every review has been read by a person beforehand.

Who may make which decision

• Administrators of trustmark.site (Linktool B.V.) can approve or reject reviews on any profile, or withdraw their publication.
• The verified manager of a business profile can do so for reviews about their own business. Who becomes a manager follows from the profile claim: a separate assessment of identity, authority and domain. For a manual claim with an active paid plan, management can be provisionally active until that assessment is complete.
• A business can only reject or withdraw a review about its own business for a fixed reason: personal data, offensive, threatening or discriminatory content, no customer experience with the business, spam or advertising, or a conflict of interest. This is possible at most three times per business profile in 30 days, with an explanation of at least 20 characters. Administrators of trustmark.site check every hide and restore the review if the reason is not correct.
• Rejecting a review or withdrawing its publication is only possible with a written reason of at least 10 characters. Every change is recorded in a non-public log with the person who made it, the time, the new status and the explanation.
• A business cannot change the text or rating of a review. It can reply publicly.
• A negative rating alone is not a reason to reject a review. Payment never guarantees the removal of a review.

The review guidelines explain which content is not allowed and when a review is rejected or withdrawn.

Report a review

Anyone can report a published review with the ‘Report review’ button next to it. You choose a reason:

• Seems fake or not based on a real experience
• Offensive, discriminatory or threatening
• Contains personal data
• About a different business
• Advertising or spam
• Something else

For ‘Something else’, we ask for an explanation of at least 10 characters. In the other cases, an explanation of up to 500 characters is optional. You can report a review once, and there is a limit on the number of reports per hour.

A report does not remove the review automatically. The manager of the business profile or an administrator of trustmark.site looks at the report and handles it. Is it about an infringement of rights, personal data or an urgent situation? Then please also contact us directly.

Three labels on a review

Each review shows what is known about the purchase.

Invited after order

The review was written through a personal, single-use invitation link that the business sent after an order. This can be a manual invitation with an order reference, or an automatic invitation through a connection with the online shop, such as the WooCommerce plugin. We do not check the order ourselves. The label means that the business invited the customer, not that we verified the purchase.

Purchase verified

This label only appears when an administrator of trustmark.site has checked proof of purchase for this review.

Posted · purchase not verified

There is no invitation after an order and no checked proof of purchase.

Administrators of trustmark.site can add or remove either label, always with a reason that is recorded in a non-public log. Signing in, an account or a reply from the business never creates a label. Imported historical reviews never receive either label.

Fictional example profiles sometimes show ‘Purchase verified · example’. That is an illustration, not a real purchase check.

Invitations from businesses

Businesses with a plan can invite customers with a personal link. Such a link is valid for 90 days, works for one review and can be revoked by the business. The business sends the invitation itself. For invitations, we do not store customer names, email addresses or raw order numbers.

A review through such an invitation receives the label ‘Invited after order’. It goes through the same waiting period and publication rules as any other review.

What we do not check

• We do not check reviewers’ identities. The name on a review is the name the writer entered.
• We do not routinely check whether an experience really took place. Only the ‘Purchase verified’ label says anything about checked proof of purchase. With ‘Invited after order’, we do not check the order.
• We do not judge whether every claim in a review is correct. When a review is reported, we check whether it breaches the guidelines.
• For Google reviews, we do not check the author or the purchase. They are shown separately, with attribution.

Example profiles

Some profiles are fictional and serve as examples. They are labelled as such. Their reviews are examples, do not count towards averages or rankings and say nothing about a real business.

Why we explain this

European consumer rules require platforms to explain whether and how they check that reviews come from real customers. This is our explanation, so you can judge for yourself how much weight to give a review. How scores are calculated is explained in the methodology.