Trustpilot hits back at allAgents over accuracy of reviews

The war of words between estate agency review website allAgents and consumer review service Trustpilot continues apace.

Trustpilot has hit back, describing allAgents’ allegations as “unfounded and incorrect”.

Yesterday we reported allAgents’ critical comments about Trustpilot based on 42 reviews of the allAgents service itself. allAgents claimed it declined to go into a partnership with Trustpilot because of concerns about the accuracy of reviews.

Now a spokesman for Trustpilot has told Estate Agent Today: “These are unfounded and incorrect allegations by another review site, that we are currently in litigation with. We do not want to be drawn into a public discussion about that at this time, but we would like to provide more understanding of how our platform works.

“Trustpilot has not removed 70 per cent of the reviews of allAgents for being ‘dubious’ or fake and the suggestion that 70 per cent of reviews across our whole platform are likely to be false is simply wrong.”

The spokesman says that any business can flag a review on Trustpilot if it thinks it breaches guidelines - for example, if it contains coarse unacceptable language. 

“All flagging behaviour of companies can now be seen on every Trustpilot company profile. You can see here, that of the 42 reviews reported by allAgents 11 have been put back online and 31 have currently been removed from the platform. You can also see that reviewers have not come back with a response, or updated their review to bring them in line with our guidelines” says the spokesman.

But he insists that, contrary to allAgents’ assertions, this does not mean that those reviews are ‘dubious’ or fake.

“If a reviewer were to come back to us at a later stage and ensure the review complies with our guidelines their review would be placed back online” he adds.

He says Trustpilot is committed to being the most transparent reviews platform; it has recently launched a new feature called Transparent Inviting, which shows how businesses are inviting and receiving their reviews.

For part of 2017 and all of 2018 there was a long-running spat between allAgents and Purplebricks based on disputed claims about the accuracy of reviews on Trustpilot. The spat ended when Purplebricks was "readmittted" to allAgents in spring 2019.