Free Fakespot alternative Detect fake reviews before you buy

What is Fakespot?

Fakespot was a free service that estimated how trustworthy the reviews on a product listing were. It was built by Fakespot Inc., a New York start-up that Saoud Khalifah founded in 2016. According to Axios, Khalifah started the project after an Amazon supplement seller misled him with rigged positive reviews. Fakespot began as a self-funded side project and later raised about $10 million from investors.

Instead of paying people to read reviews, Fakespot used machine learning to find patterns and similarities between reviews and flag the ones most likely to be deceptive. It also looked at the histories of the accounts that wrote them, searching for signs of paid or coordinated activity.

Fakespot grades explained

Every analyzed listing received a letter grade from A to F that reflected how much of its review history looked unreliable. As Bloomberg described the system in 2020, a D meant 40 to 70 percent of a listing's reviews looked fake, and an F meant more than 70 percent did. Fakespot also showed an adjusted star rating calculated only from the reviews it trusted. By 2020, the company said, more than 20 million people had used the service.

The checker on this page keeps the familiar A to F scale, but it grades only the reviews you paste in, and it shows the reason behind every verdict instead of a bare letter.

Fakespot and Mozilla: from acquisition to shutdown

The Fakespot Mozilla deal was announced on May 2, 2023, when the maker of Firefox said it had bought the company. It did not disclose the price, but it kept Fakespot's 13-person team. Mozilla then built Fakespot's technology into Firefox as a feature called Review Checker, in effect a Fakespot review checker inside the browser, scheduled to arrive with Firefox 120 in November 2023.

The arrangement lasted about two years. In May 2025, Mozilla said it would close Fakespot, along with its read-it-later app Pocket, to concentrate on Firefox. Review Checker was switched off on June 10, 2025, and the Fakespot website, mobile apps and browser extensions stopped working on July 1, 2025. Mozilla's explanation was brief: people liked the idea, but it "didn't fit a model we could sustain."

1. 2016Saoud Khalifah founds Fakespot in New York.
2. October 2020Fakespot reports that about 42% of 720 million Amazon reviews it checked looked unreliable.
3. May 2023Mozilla acquires Fakespot Inc. and keeps its team.
4. November 2023Review Checker, built on Fakespot, is scheduled to arrive in Firefox 120.
5. May 2025Mozilla announces that Fakespot and Pocket will close.
6. June 10, 2025Review Checker is removed from Firefox.
7. July 1, 2025The Fakespot website, apps and extensions go offline.

How the Fakespot analyzer worked

The Fakespot analyzer lived on the Fakespot website. You copied a product link, pasted it into the fakespot.com analyzer page and received a report: the letter grade, an adjusted rating, highlights pulled from the most useful reviews and, on some stores, a warning about the seller.

Behind that report, the Fakespot analysis combined several kinds of evidence: the wording of the reviews, the behavior and history of the accounts that posted them, and the overall shape of the rating distribution. Because it could look at reviewer histories, it could catch patterns that no single review reveals on its own.

The Fakespot extension and the Fakespot app

Most people used Fakespot through its browser extension for Chrome and Firefox, which placed grades directly on product pages so there was nothing to paste. The Chrome version alone had more than 500,000 users in 2023. The Fakespot.com app was also available for iOS and Android. All of them stopped working on July 1, 2025, so if the Fakespot extension is still installed in your browser, it is safe to remove.

Fakespot review: what it did well, and where it fell short

Fakespot reviews from users were largely positive: on the Chrome Web Store, the extension held a rating above four stars from more than 1,300 reviews in 2023. Its biggest strength was convenience: one grade, right on the product page, across several large stores. Its reviewer-history signals were also something no shopper could reproduce by hand.

Its weakness was that nobody outside the company could see how a grade was reached. Amazon pushed back on Fakespot's statistics, arguing that outside checkers cannot reliably judge authenticity without Amazon's internal data on reviewers, sellers and product history. Estimates of how many reviews are fake also vary widely with the method used, which is worth remembering whenever you see a single headline percentage.

Fakespot on Amazon, Walmart and eBay

Amazon was Fakespot's home turf, and a Fakespot.com Amazon check was the reason most people visited the site. The service also covered eBay, Walmart, Best Buy, Sephora and many Shopify-powered stores, along with Yelp and TripAdvisor for local businesses and travel.

Its most quoted finding came in October 2020. Fakespot said about 42 percent of the 720 million Amazon reviews it assessed between March and September that year were unreliable, up from roughly 36 percent in the same months of 2019, as lockdowns pushed shopping online. Walmart.com stayed at about 36 percent.

Amazon disputes figures like these. It says more than 99 percent of products in its store carry only authentic reviews, and that it proactively blocked more than 275 million suspected fake reviews in 2024.

To check an Amazon listing with this tool, open the full review list for the product, select the reviews on the page and paste them in. The checker reads Amazon's layout, including star ratings, Verified Purchase badges and "Vine Customer Review of Free Product" labels, and ignores page buttons such as Helpful and Report.

Fakespot for Flipkart reviews

People often search for Fakespot Flipkart, but Flipkart was never among the marketplaces Fakespot advertised support for. Its coverage was built around US stores, so a Fakespot Flipkart review check was not really an option even before the shutdown.

This checker works with Flipkart. Copy the reviews from a product's ratings and reviews page and paste them into the box. The tool recognizes Flipkart's Certified Buyer tag, strips READ MORE links and vote counts, and sets aside the preset review titles Flipkart suggests, such as "Terrific purchase" or "Worth every penny", so a title the site offered does not count as the reviewer's own praise.

India also has a national standard for online reviews. IS 19000:2022, in force since November 25, 2022, sets out how platforms should collect, moderate and publish reviews. It is voluntary, but it asks platforms to label reviews obtained through incentives and keep them out of overall ratings. With Indian e-commerce projected to reach about $325 billion by 2030, knowing which reviews to trust will only matter more.

Fake review statistics: the facts and figures

Fake reviews are hard to count, because the most convincing ones are never caught. These are the most reliable public figures, with the organization behind each one.

These figures come from different organizations using different methods, so compare them with care. A platform's count of blocked reviews measures its own enforcement, not how many fake reviews slip through.

Fake review laws in the US, UK and India

United States: the FTC fake review rule

The Federal Trade Commission approved its Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials on August 14, 2024, and it took effect on October 21, 2024. The rule bans creating, buying or selling fake reviews, including ones written by AI, and bans paying people for reviews that express a particular opinion. Businesses that knowingly break it face civil penalties of up to $51,744 per violation, a figure adjusted every year for inflation.

United Kingdom: the DMCC Act

Fake reviews are explicitly banned under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. Since April 2025, businesses have been legally required to take steps to prevent and remove fake reviews, with the Competition and Markets Authority overseeing the work. After a CMA investigation, Amazon committed to tougher action against fake reviewers and against catalogue abuse, where a seller attaches the reviews of a popular product to a different one.

India: IS 19000:2022

India's Bureau of Indian Standards published IS 19000:2022 for any organization that publishes consumer reviews, from marketplaces to travel and food delivery apps. The standard is voluntary for now, and the government said it would consider making it mandatory if fake reviews continued to spread.

The industry response

In October 2023, Amazon, Expedia, Glassdoor and other large review hosts formed the Coalition for Trusted Reviews to share methods for detecting fake reviews and to agree on best practices for hosting them.

The best Fakespot alternatives in 2026

When Fakespot closed, the whole category thinned out. ReviewMeta, the other well-known Amazon review checker, was reported offline in 2026, and Firefox's built-in Review Checker was removed along with Fakespot. Here is how the main options compare today.

This fake review checker

The checker at the top of this page works with any store because you bring the reviews to it. It looks for copied and near-copied wording, paid and free-product disclosures, praise without detail, shouting, marketing-style repetition of the product name and suspicious rating patterns. It then grades the batch from A to F and explains every verdict. It needs no account or extension, works on phones, and keeps what you paste on your device. Its main limit is that it only sees what you paste: it cannot look up a reviewer's history or check purchase records.

The labels stores already show

Stores publish useful signals of their own. Amazon marks Verified Purchase reviews and labels reviews from its Vine program, which gives products to reviewers for free. Flipkart tags Certified Buyer reviews. Sorting by most recent and reading the three-star reviews often tells you more than the headline rating.

Independent sources

For expensive purchases, cross-check with sources the seller does not control: independent test reviews, long-term owner forums and videos that show the product in use.

How to use this Fakespot alternative

1. Open the product page on Amazon, Flipkart, Walmart, eBay or any other store and go to its full list of reviews.
2. Select the reviews on the page and copy them. Page clutter such as dates, star lines and Helpful buttons is fine; the checker removes it.
3. Paste them into the Reviews box at the top of this page. Add the product name if you want the checker to catch reviews that repeat it like an advert.
4. Select Run analysis, or press Ctrl + Enter on a keyboard.
5. Read the grade, then use the filters to see which reviews were flagged and why.

For a fuller picture, run the check twice: once on the newest reviews and once on the critical ones. A product can have honest early reviews and a burst of paid ones later.

Check reviews now

How to spot fake reviews yourself

The checker looks for the same warning signs a careful shopper would. You can apply them by eye:

• Praise without details. Words like amazing, perfect and life-changing, with nothing about how the product was actually used.
• Disclosed incentives. Phrases such as "received this product at a discount in exchange for my honest review".
• Copied wording. Several reviews that share the same sentences or open with the same words.
• Shouting. Strings of exclamation points or whole sentences in capital letters.
• Marketing voice. The full product name repeated again and again, the way an advert would.
• A suspicious rating shape. Nearly every review is five stars, with almost no criticism.
• Reviews for a different product. Comments about features the item does not have can mean reviews were borrowed from another listing.

Genuine reviews tend to include specifics: how long the product was used, what broke or impressed, how it compares with something the reviewer owned before, and at least one drawback.