How to spot a fake review?

To spot a fake review, look for these tells: extreme rating with generic praise ('Great product! Highly recommend!' and nothing specific), reviewer history that's all 5-stars across unrelated products, clusters of similar reviews posted in a short window (a review campaign or bot batch), marketing language rather than user language ('the industry-leading solution empowered our workflow'), and perfect grammar describing no actual workflow, screen or problem.

Real reviews contain friction: specific features, specific numbers, a complaint even inside praise ('love X, but the export is slow').

Structural protections help too: prefer platforms that verify reviewers, and weight the 2–4 star middle over the extremes, which is where both fakes and grudges concentrate. Better still, separate facts from opinions entirely — verify what a product costs and does from labelled sources, then use reviews only for the experience layer.