How Software Advice Collects and Verifies Reviews

As a marketplace offering software reviews, we place significant emphasis on the credibility of user reviews, prioritizing reviewer authenticity above all. Our review verification process attempts to ensure every review reflects genuine user opinions.

Our commitment to honest reviews involves:

• 2.5 million+ verified user ratings and reviews to guarantee breadth and depth of opinions

• More than 30 human quality assurance (QA) moderators to carefully collect and scrutinize each review

• Multiple control checks per review to confirm each submission's authenticity

• Advanced technology and processes to analyze text quality, detect plagiarism, and identify the use of generative AI.

Our process of collecting user reviews

At Software Advice, we understand the value of diverse perspectives in making informed decisions.

To ensure a wide variety of opinions, we collect reviews in two ways:

• Non-incentivized reviews

  • Any software user can leave a review for any product listed on our site. All submitted reviews are subject to our QA process prior to publication.

• Incentivized reviews

  • Software users are invited to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive for their time and effort. 

  • All reviewers get the incentive upon approval, regardless of the rating they submit. All incentivized reviews are subject to our QA process prior to publication.

  • Nominal incentives encourage participation from users who might otherwise not submit a review and help us capture a wider range of perspectives across large portfolios of software offerings.

Check our Reviews FAQs to learn more about incentivized reviews.

Our process of verifying reviews

Our verification process attempts to ensure each review reflects the genuine experience of a true software user. Here's what we do:

1. The reviewer’s identity is confirmed

Our identity verification process involves:

• A robust QA moderation system operating behind the scenes

  • Our QA moderating team uses a combination of manual checks and enrichment services to confirm that each reviewer is a genuine person with real experience of the product. The team also flags conflicts of interest and AI-generated personas.

  • In case a reviewer’s identity cannot be confirmed and/or a conflict of interest is flagged, the review gets disqualified and is never published.

• Reviewer profiles displayed on our site

  • To help buyers find relevant reviews from similar individuals, we create dedicated reviewer profiles that include professional backgrounds and expertise, and offer crucial context into the relevance and credibility of the feedback.

  • For reviews of software solutions, a reviewer’s profile may display the name, photo, function, industry, organization size, and duration of use.

  • We understand buyers’ need for reassurance that the feedback is from real people. At the same time, we honor reviewers’ right to preserve a certain degree of anonymity online. Therefore, in some cases, certain personally identifiable information, such as photos and/or full names, may not be displayed.

2. The review content is verified

Once the review verification team confirms the reviewer’s identity, they proceed to verifying the content submitted. This process includes:

• Multiple manual control checks: Our team of QA moderators performs a series of control checks to validate the genuineness of reviews. This includes checking the reviewer's history, the depth of their interaction with the software, and cross-referencing data to ensure consistency and truthfulness.

• Technology checks: We employ leading technologies to analyze content quality and check for generative AI and plagiarized content, ensuring every review is authentic.

• Fair and equal treatment for all reviews: Each review submitted to Software Advice undergoes the same rigorous verification process. We treat all reviews equally, ensuring a fair and unbiased moderation process.

• Clear review submission guidelines: To maintain the quality and authenticity of reviews, we provide detailed submission guidelines that outline what is expected from each submission.

For more information, check our community guidelines.

3. Fake reviews are actively combated

Our goal is to protect the integrity of our platform by actively combating fake identities and fraudulent reviews. Our process for identifying fake elements employs sophisticated strategies, including pattern recognition, behavioral analysis, and cross-referencing data points, to identify spam profiles, fake identities, and fraudulent reviews. 

When a review is flagged as suspicious, we take the following immediate actions:

• Request additional proof: We contact the reviewer for further evidence of software use or additional information.

• Assessment and decision: We review each proof of use for authenticity. Legitimate reviews and reviewers are published and continue to be nurtured within our community. If the proof is insufficient or not provided, the review is disqualified and is never published, and the reviewer is permanently flagged and removed from our community.

Developing actionable insights from ratings and reviews 

We leverage user ratings and reviews to generate insights regarding product features, capabilities, value for money, or usability. These insights help us shape robust research methodologies to determine top product rankings, such as Software Advice FrontRunners reports, and inform product evaluations in our editorial content.