Review Authenticity and Fraud Policy

Vitals Product Reviews helps Shopify stores collect reviews from their customers, show them on the store and, when the store chooses, share them with Google. This policy applies to every review collected or imported through Vitals. It explains what we treat as a genuine review, how we keep reviews fair, how we detect fake and spam reviews, and what Google receives.

What Counts as a Genuine Review

Written by a real customer. A review should come from someone who bought or used the product, and describe their own experience.
No employee or conflict-of-interest reviews. Reviews by the store's owners or staff, their family, or anyone paid or connected to the store are not genuine reviews.
No fake or AI-generated reviews. Reviews must be written by real customers, not invented, bought, or generated by AI or any other tool.
Incentives never depend on the rating. A store may thank customers with a discount for leaving a review, but the discount is the same whatever star rating they give, and those reviews are flagged to Google as incentivised.
Google gets reviews in their original language. We never translate a review before sending it to Google.

Fair Collection and Publishing

Every eligible buyer can be asked. Review requests are sent based on the order (paid, fulfilled, the products the store chose), never on the rating we expect someone to give.
Publishing never depends on the rating. When a store publishes reviews automatically, 1-star and 5-star reviews are treated the same.
Negative reviews still reach Google. A merchant can hide a review from their store, but a hidden review is still sent to Google. Hiding a review cannot remove it from what Google shows.

How We Detect Fake and Spam Reviews

Verified purchases for Google. We tell Google a review is a verified purchase only when Vitals has checked it against a real order in the store, or when the review app it was imported from checked the order itself (Loox, Yotpo and Stamped).
Duplicate reviews. We look for review text that repeats within a store, or that appears in another store's reviews.
Links, contact details and personal information. We look for reviews that contain links, email addresses, phone numbers or other personal details.
Banned words. Merchants can set a list of banned words. A review that contains one is held for moderation and is not published automatically.
Submission limits. We limit how many reviews a store can receive per minute, which slows down automated bulk submissions.

How We Handle Them

Spam is flagged. Duplicate reviews and reviews detected as spam are sent to Google with the spam flag, so Google does not count them. Merchants can also mark any review as spam in their Vitals admin: it stays off their store and is flagged to Google the same way.
Personal and contact details are kept out of Google. Reviews with links, email addresses, phone numbers or other personal details are not sent to Google.
Reviews held for moderation stay out of Google until the merchant decides on them.

Reviews We Send to Google

Stores can share their reviews with Google so star ratings appear on Google Shopping. For those stores, Google receives:

Published and hidden reviews. Reviews waiting for moderation are not sent.
Reviews the store collected from its own customers, including those imported from other review apps. Reviews imported from AliExpress and Amazon are never sent.
A verified-purchase mark only for reviews verified as described above.
A spam flag on duplicate reviews, detected spam and reviews the merchant marked as spam.
An incentivised flag on every review that earned a discount.
No reviews with links or personal details.

Reporting a Review

If you believe a review collected through Vitals is fake or breaks this policy, contact Vitals support with a link to the review and why you think so.

Consumer Protection Rules

This policy is written with the FTC rule on consumer reviews and testimonials and the UK Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act in mind. Merchants remain responsible for how they collect and display reviews on their own store, including disclosing incentives where the law requires it.