What do I do about a fake review?
The short answer
Report it through the platform, which is the only route that can remove it, then reply once — calmly, stating you have no record of the visit and inviting contact. Do not accuse anyone publicly. Removal is uncertain and slow, so the reply matters more than the report: onlookers judge your response, and a measured one neutralises most of the damage.
On this page
First, be honest with yourself
Some reviews that feel fake are genuine. A customer you do not remember, an experience worse than you realised, someone who came on a bad night.
Before treating one as malicious, check: is there any chance this happened? Bookings, receipts, staff memory. Publicly disputing a real customer is far more damaging than the review, and it is very hard to walk back.
The genuinely fake ones usually have tells — no detail specific to your business, a name nobody recognises, a description of a service you do not offer, several similar reviews within a short window, or an account with a suspicious history.
Report it, but expect slow
Every major platform has a reporting route, and it is the only mechanism that can actually remove a review. Use it.
Set your expectations honestly: removal is inconsistent and can take weeks. The platform is assessing whether it breaches their policies, not whether it is true — and "this did not happen" is difficult for them to verify.
So report it, then treat the reply as the main task.
The reply that works
Short, calm, once. Something close to:
Thank you for the feedback. We have no record of a visit matching this, and we would genuinely like to understand what happened. Please contact us at [email] so we can look into it.
Why this holds up regardless:
If it is fake, you have said so without accusing anyone, and the absence of a response afterwards is itself visible to readers.
If it turns out to be real — which happens more than people expect — you have not called a customer a liar in public. You have room to move.
To an onlooker, you sound like a business that keeps records and takes complaints seriously. That is exactly the impression that neutralises the review.
What not to do
Do not accuse them publicly. "This is a fake review from a competitor" reads as defensive whether or not it is true, and if you are wrong it is unrecoverable.
Do not reply more than once. A back-and-forth under a bad review doubles its visibility and makes you look like the one with a problem.
Do not ask staff or friends to post reviews to bury it. Against every platform's policies, recognisable, and it puts your whole profile at risk to address one entry.
Do not reply while angry. Write it, wait an hour, cut it in half.
The most effective response
Volume. One bad review among six is severe. One among sixty is noise, and readers discount an outlier automatically when the pattern around it is strong.
If you have been hit with something unfair, the productive response is not fighting that entry — it is asking your genuinely happy customers for reviews over the following weeks. That dilutes it faster than any dispute process, and you keep the benefit permanently.
When it is part of a pattern
Several fake reviews in a short period, or a competitor you can identify, is a different situation. Document everything — screenshots, dates, account names — and escalate through the platform's process rather than replying publicly to each one. In serious cases involving defamation there may be legal routes, which is a conversation for a lawyer rather than an article.
What the doubting reader does next
Somebody who reads a review they are unsure about does one very specific thing: they look you up. That is the moment your website is doing work you cannot see.
A site that answers their questions plainly — real photographs, current prices, hours that are right, a name and a face — resolves the doubt in your favour. A site that is out of date, or a single page from four years ago, does not contradict the review. It corroborates it. That is the quiet cost of a website nobody has touched in a while, and it is far larger during a bad week than a good one.
If that describes yours, the fix is not a redesign — it is being able to change it at all. Helm exists for that gap specifically, so "the website is out of date" stops being a permanent condition rather than a temporary one. A free audit will tell you where yours stands before you spend anything.