Around 8% of the 31.1 million reviews submitted to Tripadvisor in 2024 were fake, according to the company’s “Transparency Report 2025.”
That’s more than twice the number detected in 2022, according to company reports.
But that doesn’t mean the number of fake reviews on the site doubled, said Becky Foley, vice president and head of trust and safety at Tripadvisor.
While submissions to the website increased, Tripadvisor’s policies on fake reviews also changed, she said, citing the company’s more aggressive stance against “incentivized reviews.” These occur when companies offer customers discounts or freebies in exchange for reviews, or provide incentives to employees whose names are mentioned in reviews.
“The employees get their mom, best friend or cousin to submit reviews, mentioning their names,” she said. “It ends up leading to businesses having reviews that aren’t actually valuable to our community.”
What is a fake review?
According to Tripadvisor, it is “any review submitted by someone who is knowingly submitting biased or non-firsthand content, in an effort to manipulate a property’s reputation.”
But there’s a bigger reason detections are on the rise, she said.
“Our system is always getting better,” she said, citing Tripadvisor’s three-pronged process that relies on auto-detection, human review and community feedback.
Some 7% of submissions in 2024 were auto-rejected before being posted, the report said. Auto-detections also flagged another 5% of submissions for human review.
However, Tripadvisor’s trust and safety team ultimately moderated more than 4.2 million reviews, amounting to more than 13% of all submissions in 2024, according to the report.
Another 244,000 reviews were disputed by members at the third stage of review, the report showed. Of these, some 72% remained on the site, and 28% were removed, it said.
How to spot a fake
Tripadvisor has four categories of fake submissions: boosting, vandalism, member fraud and paid reviews, Foley said.
There’s a misconception that vandalism accounts for most fake reviews, Foley said, adding that boosting (54%) and member fraud (39%) have long made up the bulk of those reviews.
Paid reviews (4.8%) are a smaller but “more pernicious” category of fakes, she said.
This includes “review farms,” she said, adding that these authors are often involved in other types of online fraud too.
Most paid reviews originate in Asia, Foley said, even though only 17% of real submissions came from the continent last year.
In 2024, more than one-third of all paid submissions detected by Tripadvisor came from Indonesia and Vietnam, while in 2022 most paid reviews came from India, reports show.
A ‘cat and mouse’ game
Rooting out fake reviews is a constant “cat and mouse” game, Foley said. But Tripadvisor is getting better at detecting them every year, she said.
“We are the first to admit that we’re never going to reach absolute perfection,” said Foley. “We might not catch [a fake] the first time, but we’ll catch it eventually.”
Tripadvisor uses its own technology, developed over 25 years, to flush out fakes — a system that increasingly relies less on what a review says, and more on how it’s posted, she said. The company uses artificial intelligence and behavioral biometrics to find patterns, which can detect abnormalities like submission spikes and IP address masking attempts.
To catch paid reviewers, Tripadvisor investigators pose as fake review brokers, Foley said. When a bad actor posts their first paid review, “we have all of the data … hundreds of data points associated with it,” which the company uses to build patterns to identify other reviews submitted by the author in the past.
Violators aren’t pulled off the site, but their rankings are penalized for a year, Foley said. Repeat offenders receive a red badge on their listing “that says this property is trying to deceive you,” she said.
AI reviews: not fake, but not allowed
Most reviews written by AI are not fake, Foley said, calling that “one of the myths I love to bust.”
Most are written by regular travelers that use the technology to make their writing more polished, she said.
Still, the company doesn’t allow them — at least not for now.
In 2024, Tripadvisor removed more than 200,000 reviews that it suspected were written by AI, according to the company’s 2025 transparency report.
“We will continue to monitor the trends and patterns. But right now, we just don’t want travelers to come to TripAdvisor for a sea of sameness.”
