How to get Trustpilot reviews: a legitimate guide
How to get Trustpilot reviews without breaking the rules? This guide explains the legitimate ways to invite customers, the platform's guidelines, and the mistakes that get a profile flagged. Honest, practical advice for any business.
Why Trustpilot reviews matter
Trust as a buying signal
Shoppers check reviews before they commit to a purchase. A Trustpilot profile with a positive score and recent activity reassures people who have never heard of your brand before they spend any money.
Trustpilot, founded in 2007 in Copenhagen, is one of the most visited review platforms in the world. Its business pages often rank on Google for a brand name, giving a company an extra slot on the first page.
What reviews do for search
Reviews alone are not a confirmed ranking factor. Google has said that third-party reviews do not directly move positions, even though they shape how users judge a site before they click.
They still help indirectly through clicks and branded searches. Read our guide on whether do Trustpilot reviews help SEO to understand what the star rating can and cannot do.
Trustpilot's rules on asking for reviews
What the guidelines allow
Trustpilot asks businesses to invite genuine customers who have really used the product or service. Only someone with an actual experience is supposed to leave a review on the page.
You can send invitations through your own account, or ask in person, by phone and by email. The only hard rule is that the request is not tied to a reward or to a promise of special treatment.
What is not allowed
Offering money, discounts or free products in exchange for a review breaks Trustpilot's rules. The platform treats incentivised reviews as a form of manipulation, not as honest feedback.
Reviewing your own business or asking staff and family to do it is also banned. Profiles caught doing this can be flagged with a warning, and the reviews themselves can be removed.
How to get Trustpilot reviews step by step
Invite your real customers
The most reliable method is to invite a customer right after a purchase or a service is completed. A short email with a direct link to your Trustpilot page works well for most small and local businesses.
Paid Trustpilot plans can collect and send invitations automatically after each order. On the free plan, you still invite customers manually through the dashboard.
Time the request well
Ask when the experience is still fresh, usually within a few days of delivery. A customer who has just received good service is more likely to write a review than one contacted weeks later.
Do not ask too early or too late. A request sent long after the fact gets fewer responses than one sent while the memory is still warm.
Tools Trustpilot gives you to collect reviews
Review invitations and links
Every business gets a public review page on trustpilot.com. From your account you can copy a review invitation link and share it by email, text message or on social media.
Trustpilot also provides widgets to place on your website. These show your current score and give every visitor a quick way to leave feedback without leaving your page.
Embedding reviews on your site
You can display your Trustpilot rating on your own pages using official widgets. This makes the score visible where people buy, not only on Trustpilot itself.
Before you start, understand the platform you are asking people to use. Read our guide on how Trustpilot works to learn what a profile is and how reviews get published.
Mistakes that slow you down
Fake and incentivised reviews
Buying reviews or posting them yourself rarely survives moderation. Trustpilot uses automated systems and a flagging process to detect reviews that look fake or out of place.
A profile with a warning badge hurts more than it helps. Buyers notice the alert on the page and may end up trusting your business less, not more.
Asking the same person twice
Sending repeated invitations to the same customer can annoy them and lower your response rate. Trustpilot expects each review to come from a unique, genuine experience with your business.
Keep a simple list of who you have already asked. A clean, respectful approach gets better results than spamming your entire customer list.
Getting reviews vs. buying a profile
Building a profile from zero
A new business starts with no reviews and must earn them one by one. This takes time, but every genuine review adds to a lasting public reputation that compounds over the years.
There is no shortcut that respects Trustpilot's rules. Anyone promising hundreds of reviews overnight is almost certainly offering fake reviews that will be flagged or removed.
An existing profile on a domain
Some businesses skip the slow start by acquiring a domain that already has a Trustpilot history. The profile and its reviews stay public even after the original site goes offline.
This is the core of what we do. See our guide on how to buy a domain with a Trustpilot profile to weigh the opportunity and the risks before you commit.