Five Star Performance? How To Spot Fake Solar Reviews

A bunch of reviews of an installer all being published at the same time can be a red flag.

Every fortnight, the SolarQuotes Vetting Council convenes to undertake a forensic analysis of the companies asking to join our list of approved installers of solar, batteries and EV chargers. The investigation pours over every clue available, including the most obvious: online reviews. But in this age of bot farms and customer incentives, how can you tell if a review is legitimate or not?

One particular installer at a recent Vetting Council meeting seemed to have a pretty glowing reputation with customers. On closer inspection, however, something didn’t quite look right. Why were so many of the reviews of this Australia-based installer, all written in Mandarin, published around the same time?

There’s plenty of legitimate reasons for an installer to have a lot of reviews in a particular language — maybe they are a popular business within a particular community — but it is always worth hitting that ‘translate’ button if you don’t know what the review actually says.

Doing just that revealed that according to those stellar five-star reviews, the company is either run by a modern-day Adonis, or by someone a little tricky with the truth:

Either Ryan Gosling secretly runs a solar install side hustle we don’t know about, or this company’s employees have all been ordered to leave positive reviews.

Review Farms And Enraged Customers

Employees leaving five-star reviews en masse for their boss is just one form of misleading review type to look out for. Notably, fake reviews can come in both positive and negative forms. Some of the main types are:

• Bribed reviews — customers are incentivised to give a business a positive rating through discounts and vouchers;
• Farmed reviews — shady ‘review farms’ are paid to generate large numbers of fake opinions by their staff or AI chatbots;
• Gated reviews — customers who say they had a good experience are encouraged to leave a review, while those who indicate they had a bad experience are told to leave feedback privately – or if they leave a public review, the business flags it as abuse to get it taken down;
• Vindicative customers and competitors — people who are angry at the business (or competing with them) create multiple profiles to leave multiple negative reviews, and invent wild claims about the business.

How To Spot A Fake

Gatekeeper to SolarQuotes’ review pages Ned Holland, who works to keep them fakery-free, says that the main red flag to spot false feedback is the language used:

If a company has close to all positive ratings but the language of every review mostly reads the same and constantly mentions the name of the installer/brand used, I would say they are likely be fake or at least heavily incentivised. We had a manufacturer try to leave a series of fake reviews on SQ a couple of years ago. I had processed a couple over a week not realising they were written in the same pattern but once I looked at them all together – it was clearly obvious something fishy was going on. I contacted the manufacturer asking them if they were genuine, they said yes. I asked them (and the authors of the reviews) if they could provide any kind of proof of purchase. They never replied. The authors of these reviews had [claimed] this brand was installed by specific installers in Australia. When I rang these installers up to inquire about the reviews they advised: ‘I have never heard of this brand or these customers’.

Low On Detail, High On Praise?

• Loads of extremely low-detail reviews — not everyone can be bothered going into detail, but if everyone is giving a one-word review, something is probably up;
• Ridiculously over-the-top praise — the fact the installer turned up on time shouldn’t cause the customer to burst into tears of joy;
• Vast numbers of reviews at the same time — exactly how did this team of three tradies do a hundred installs on the same day?

Where To Find Reviews You Can Trust

A review of an installer on the SolarQuotes review platform, with detailed feedback that isn’t over the top, accompanied by photos of the job.

Unfortunately, the reality is that the major review platforms are riddled with fakes. It is simply not feasible to apply a fine-tooth comb of scrutiny to the vast quantity of feedback left on all the products and services listed on Google and Facebook — although they do have processes in place and if you feel very confident a review is fake, it might be worth flagging with them.

“Google and Facebook both equally can have a fair share [of fakes] — you never know who is being coerced with incentives to leave a positive review and sometimes these sites can take a long time to look into a potentially disingenuous review,” says Ned.

The SolarQuotes team doesn’t just heavily scrutinise the Google and Facebook reviews of installers as part of our vetting process — we also apply the same treatment to reviews made on our own website, and delete any fakes we find. So we recommend browsing the SolarQuotes reviews of installers, solar panels, inverters, batteries and EV chargers as a first port of call — some are accompanied by photos of the install so you can see for yourself.

Of course, we would say that, so you might want to check out some Google reviews of SolarQuotes itself. When you do so, just make sure to look out for the red flags listed above. If you see hundreds of simultaneously published reviews written in Latin all raving about how attractive everyone on our team is … it might be best to take those with a grain of salt.