Food delivery giant Just Eat is among five firms under investigation by the UK's competition watchdog as part of its crackdown on fake and misleading online reviews.
The Competition and Markets Authority also launched probes against funeral firm Dignity, motor platform Autotrader, restaurant chain and delivery Pasta Evangelists and customer feedback platform Feefo.
The CMA is aiming to find out whether Just Eat's ratings system has inflated certain restaurants’ and grocers’ star ratings – "giving consumers a potentially misleading picture of quality when choosing where to order."
The investigation will also look into whether a number of one‑star reviews were not published on Autotrader, and were not counted towards star ratings, "therefore denying consumers a fully rounded picture of other customers’ experiences."
Pasta Evangelists, a business that owns a chain of restaurants and offers delivery, is also under scrutiny by UK authorities.
The CMA is looking into whether discounts were offered on future orders in exchange for leaving 5-star reviews on delivery apps, without this being disclosed.
Such practice means "people may not have known how reliable or representative those ratings were," the CMA says.
While the CMA is investigating these five businesses, it has "not reached any conclusions about whether consumer law has been broken."
Since April last year, companies in Britain have been banned from certain tactics around online reviews under law, such as fake posts, paid-for reviews that are not clearly marked as incentivised, as well as for hiding negative feedback.
"Fake reviews strike at the heart of consumer trust - with many of us worrying about misleading content when looking at reviews online," Sarah Cardell, chief executive of the CMA said.
"With household budgets under pressure, people need to know they're getting genuine information - not reviews or star ratings that have been manipulated to push them towards the wrong choice.
"We've given businesses the time to get things right. Now we're deploying our new powers to tackle some of the most harmful practices head on."
Tips to spot fake reviews
The UK watchdog has also released recommendations to consumers on how to spot fake reviews.
"Reading reviews" might sound obvious but shoppers are too often "taken in by 5-star ratings without actually reading what people have to say about a product or service."
Reading some of the feedback can reveal that many reviews "sound dubious, overly vague or even totally unrelated to the item they’re supposedly endorsing."
Being alert to AI generated reviews has also become more important in recent years, with reviews that sound "too slick" or perfectly crafted likely to be fake.
A three or four-star reviews, on the other hand, are "unlikely to be fake", the CMA advised, so they can be particularly useful – as can be checking services across multiple customer review platforms.
