Advertising with reviews: where the line runs
Showing reviews carries one disclosure with it. Section 5b(3) of the UWG treats it as material information whether and how a trader ensures that published reviews come from consumers who actually used or bought the goods or services. You do not have to verify, you have to say what you do.
The sentence, and what it does not demand
Section 5b(3) UWG treats one thing as material information: whether and how the trader ensures that the published reviews come from consumers who actually used or bought the goods or services. Read it twice, because the common misreading is expensive in the other direction.
The law does not require you to verify every review. It requires you to say whether you verify and how. A shop that publishes everything it receives can say exactly that and be compliant. A shop that verifies and says nothing is the one with a problem.
What the disclosure costs and what it earns
The work is 1 sentence next to the reviews. Something like: reviews are published as received and we do not check whether the writer was a customer, or: only reviews from confirmed orders are published, matched against the order number. Both are lawful, and they say very different things to the reader.
The reader now matters twice over. 82 percent of consumers read AI generated review summaries, 23 percent decide on that summary alone, and consumers consult an average of six review sites. A verification sentence on your page is the kind of statement a summary can repeat, and the absence of one is noticed by comparison with the other five.
Set that against the thresholds people apply anyway: 68 percent use only businesses at four stars or better, 31 percent require 4.5, and 74 percent want reviews from the last three months. A credible verification statement supports a rating that is already believable. It does not rescue one that is not.
| Your practice | What to disclose | Lawful |
|---|---|---|
| Everything is published unchecked | Say that no check is carried out | Yes |
| Only confirmed orders | Say how the match is made | Yes |
| Verified plus unverified, mixed | Say which is which | Yes |
| Selection by rating, presented as all | Nothing saves this | No |
Two things not to do
Do not publish a selection and describe it as all reviews. Filtering by rating while implying completeness is the misrepresentation the provision exists to prevent.
Do not buy reviews to fill the gap. Beyond the legal exposure, the arithmetic does not work: reaching 4.5 from 3.9 with 40 reviews needs 48 five star reviews, and a cluster of them arriving at once is the pattern platforms look for.
Questions and answers
Do I have to verify my reviews?
Can I hide bad reviews?
Where does the sentence go?
Does it apply to reviews on other platforms?
Sources
- Section 5b Gesetz gegen den unlauteren Wettbewerb (UWG) The disclosure duty for consumer reviews
- BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 Reader behaviour, thresholds and AI summary readership
