How to find the best online review websites
There are many platforms claiming to be among the best online review websites – but how can you tell?
With unprecedented amounts of information online, it should be easier than ever to find honest and impartial advice.
Yet in many respects, the deluge of user-generated and marketing-led online content has achieved precisely the opposite.
From clickbait churnalism to AI-generated fake news, it’s becoming harder to find objective analysis online.
Even internet searches for the best online review websites might include results for sites which are outdated, biased or thrown together in pursuit of advertising revenue.
As such, any attempts to identify the best online review websites in any particular industry, country or niche should be approached with a degree of caution.
However, a few pragmatic steps should help to ensure your future searches yield informative and impartial results…
User-generated reviews
There are two main forms of review sites – those written by professionals, and those whose reviews are aggregated from comments/rankings/reviews submitted by the public.
In terms of the latter, we’re all familiar with TripAdvisor and Trustpilot – America and Denmark’s respective contributions to user reviews – as well as the ubiquitous Google reviews.
However, entire industries have evolved to game, cheat and generally distort user-generated rankings by providing fake seller feedback or falsified ecommerce product reviews.
Amazon is awash with fake reviews of (usually imported) consumer goods, generated by a swarm of overseas copy farms, bots and agents working on behalf of the manufacturers.
We can’t recommend social media platforms as arbiters of truth, though enthusiastic amateurs often try to be impartial, as with Shawn Sanbrooke’s YouTube theme park reviews.
Social media content is often unmoderated and unverified, potentially conveying an underlying agenda the audience isn’t informed about.
Corporate reviews
The vagaries of consumer reviews might steer you towards the roundups and reviews published by legitimate websites under the auspices of “Top X products for 2025” roundups.
Sadly, this is also something of a lucky dip in terms of the veracity of reviews.
Some websites get paid by companies to promote their products in the guise of critical reviews. Others earn revenue every time someone buys a product after reading a review.
This is known as affiliate marketing. It’s not illegal or unethical, but those websites often ignore superior products/services in favour of the ones they’re being paid to promote.
So how can you find the best online review websites to get honest expert opinions or lived user experiences of a brand, product or service?
Trust the traditional platforms
Legacy media outlets are often mocked by people who prefer to take their news from TikTok, yet newspapers of record like the Telegraph and Guardian rarely publish biased consumer reviews.
The political leanings of their news sections shouldn’t detract from the generally high standard of product, service and supplier reviews among national newspapers.
Printed magazines rarely favour affiliate marketing over honest reportage, and their websites tend to replicate the same content as their print editions.
That means the online platforms for brands like Good Housekeeping and What Car? can be trusted to provide feedback without fear or favour.
You can also trust consumer champion platforms like Money Saving Expert and Which?, both of whom exist to make the public’s lives easier.
Similarly, the non-profit Consumer Reports website has spent 90 years impartially reviewing products available in America, many of which are also available over here.
Some of these sites are paywalled or subscription-only, though this is often a barometer of integrity since they’re pursuing paid journalism rather than chasing clicks or likes.
