I nearly booked them on the strength of the reviews alone. Two hundred and something of them, almost all five stars, scrolling on and on beneath a cleaning company’s Google listing like a standing ovation that would not stop. It was only when I actually started reading, rather than counting, that something began to itch. The praise was strangely weightless. “Amazing service, highly recommend.” “Very professional, will use again.” Lovely words, all of them, and not one mentioning a name, a room, a stain, a street, or a single thing that a real person who had actually had their flat cleaned might think to say. That was the moment I stopped trusting the number and started reading the reviews like someone looking for the seams.
Because that is where we are now. Most of us pick a cleaner the way we pick a restaurant or a plumber, by glancing at the stars and skimming the top few comments, and the people who would rather not be picked on merit have noticed. Fake reviews have become common enough that the law has been rewritten to deal with them, and the platforms remove them by the million. Yet plenty still slip through, sitting live long enough to win a booking. The last line of defence is not Google’s algorithm or Trustpilot’s AI. It is you, reading properly, for about ninety seconds, before you hand over your address.
The Rule That Changed in 2025, Which Almost Nobody Noticed
Here is a fact worth carrying into every review you read from now on: fake reviews are illegal. Since 6 April 2025, under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, posting fake reviews and hiding the fact that a review was incentivised became banned practices – automatically unfair and unlawful, no argument required. The ban runs both ways, covering glowing fakes written to inflate a business and malicious fakes written to sink a rival. It also catches the quieter tricks, such as burying negative reviews or dressing up a star rating to look better than the feedback behind it.
This is enforced by the Competition and Markets Authority, which can now fine a company up to ten per cent of its global turnover without ever going near a court. Platforms carry a duty too: anyone publishing reviews has to take reasonable steps to keep fake ones off and remove them when found. None of which makes fakes disappear, of course. What it does mean is that when you spot one, you are not merely looking at something tacky. You are looking at something a business is now breaking the law to show you, which is a rather clarifying thought to hold while you scroll.
What the Platforms Catch, and What Gets Through
The review sites are not asleep. Trustpilot’s own 2025 report says it removed roughly 4.5 million fake reviews across 2024, about seven per cent of everything submitted that year, with around nine in ten caught automatically before they ever went live, screening close to two hundred thousand new reviews a day. Google runs its own detection on the millions of reviews posted to Business Profiles. The machinery is real, and it is improving.
But seven per cent removed is also seven per cent that got as far as the front door, and the ones that survive detection are precisely the ones designed to look convincing. A crude fake gets caught. A careful one – written in plausible English, posted from a real-looking account, spaced out over a few weeks – is exactly the sort that lands on the page and stays there. So the detection systems raise the floor without ever closing the gap, and the gap is where your own eyes have to do the work.
The Tells in the Review Itself
Start with the words, because fakes and genuine reviews tend to talk differently. A real review of a cleaning job is usually specific in a way a fabricated one is not. It mentions the oven, the state of the flat after the builders left, the fact that they got the limescale off the shower screen at last, the cleaner’s actual name. Fakes deal in warm fog – “great service,” “very reliable,” “10/10” – because whoever wrote them was never in your kitchen and has nothing concrete to describe.
Then look at the timing. Genuine reviews trickle in, one here, two there, at the ragged pace of real life. A sudden cluster of five-star reviews all posted within the same few days is a classic signature, whether it is a new business buying itself a reputation or an established one scrambling to bury a bad week under fresh praise. Sort the reviews by date and watch for the spike.
Watch the language repeat, too. If three different “customers” describe the service with oddly similar phrasing, or if reviews keep cramming in the full business name and location – “the best end of tenancy cleaning in Clapham SW4” – you are probably reading copy written to please a search engine rather than a person. Nobody genuinely delighted with their clean writes their own postcode into the compliment.
Keep an eye out, finally, for the incentive that slips through. A review that cheerfully thanks the company for the discount it handed over in exchange, or a business page openly dangling money off your next clean for a five-star rating, is waving directly at what the new law bans. Genuine feedback is not bought with vouchers, and a firm that runs its reviews like a loyalty scheme is quietly telling you how it prefers to compete.
The Tells in the Reviewer and the Shape of the Profile
The single most useful move costs one click. On Google, tap the reviewer’s name and look at what else they have reviewed. A real Londoner who praised a Balham cleaner will also, somewhere, have reviewed a local pub, a dentist, a takeaway – a plausible trail of an actual life lived in a place. A fake account often has a single review to its name, or a bizarre scattering across the globe, gushing about a cleaner in south London, a locksmith in Texas and a hotel in Manila within the same fortnight. That pattern is a tell no amount of polished wording can hide.
Step back and look at the overall shape, as well. A wall of nothing but five stars, without a single lukewarm three or a solitary complaint, is not the reassurance it appears to be – real businesses collect the occasional grumble, and a perfectly spotless record is more suspicious than a strong one with a few honest dents. Consider proportion, too. A two-person cleaning round working a corner of Crouch End does not accumulate nine hundred reviews without help, and a review count wildly out of step with the size of the operation is worth a raised eyebrow.
Google and Trustpilot Are Not the Same Beast
The two platforms work differently, and it changes how you read them. Trustpilot is an open platform, meaning anyone can review any business whether or not they can prove they used it. It marks reviews as verified when they come through a confirmed transaction and unverified when they do not – but, tellingly, both still count towards the headline TrustScore, so a glowing star rating can rest on a pile of unverified entries. Businesses can invite reviews, which nudges them to ask their happiest customers and quietly skip the rest, and they embed hand-picked five-star quotes on their own websites. What they cannot do is pay Trustpilot to delete a genuine bad review, which is worth remembering. If you ever see Trustpilot’s own warning banner on a profile, flagging detected misuse of the platform, treat it as the clearest red flag going.
Google’s strength for a suspicious reader is that reviewer trail, the click-through into someone’s history that Trustpilot makes harder. Its weakness is volume and the ease of spinning up accounts. On either platform, you can report a review you believe is fake, and given the platforms’ new legal duty to act, that flag now carries a little more weight than it used to.
The Fakes That Point the Other Way
Not every fake is flattering. A cluster of vague one-star reviews landing together, from thin new accounts, describing no real transaction, is often a competitor’s handiwork rather than genuine disappointment – and it is every bit as illegal as invented praise. This is why the way a company answers its critics tells you so much. A measured, specific reply to a genuine complaint is the mark of a real business that occasionally has a bad day. A pattern of furious, defensive responses, or an eerie total silence beneath obviously odd reviews, tells its own story. As the blog’s earlier piece on recognising valid feedback put it, the response is sometimes more revealing than the review.
How to Actually Read a Cleaner’s Reviews
None of this takes long, and it comes down to a change of habit rather than any real effort. Stop counting stars and start reading them. Trust the measured four-star review that names the cleaner and describes the job far more than the ecstatic five-star one that could have been written about a car wash. Sort by date and look for unnatural spikes. Click a couple of reviewer names. And never lean on a single platform, because the honest shape of a business only emerges when you lay Google, Trustpilot and anywhere else it appears side by side and see whether they tell the same story.
A cleaning company with a handful of imperfect, detailed, human reviews across a few years is, more often than not, a safer bet than one with a flawless wall that went up last month. Stars are an input, not a verdict. The person deciding whether to trust someone with a key to your home should be you, reading closely – not an algorithm, and certainly not a number.