Fake Reviews Policy
Last updated 02.07.2026
Consumer trust and confidence are essential to Carwow.
This Fake Reviews Policy explains how we safeguard the authenticity and reliability of the reviews and content published on our platforms, so you can be confident in the information you read.
At Carwow, we recognise that online reviews have become one of the most powerful tools that help consumers make decisions, such as buying or selling their car. We also know that reviews are only meaningful if they are genuine, unbiased, and real, which is why we take the integrity of our reviews seriously and are committed to spotting and promptly taking action against fake or misleading reviews.
This policy governs the use of reviews on Carwow, Auto Express, Evo and Carwow’s related channels such as our YouTube channel. We specifically use content from our consumer reviews powerhouse, Driver Power, to display reviews and aggregated scores on carwow.co.uk, www.carbuyer.co.uk and autoexpress.co.uk.
It also covers the other reviews and ratings we show: our editorial and video reviews, the reviews our own customers leave about Carwow and the reviews and ratings of our dealer partners.
Read below to learn how we collect, display and manage consumer reviews on our websites and what steps we are taking to stop fake or misleading reviews across our websites.
Driver Power reviews
Driver Power exists to give real car owners a voice. While manufacturers know the nuts and bolts of cars, nobody knows the quirks and perks like the owners. Driver Power provides independent, first-hand insights that help consumers make informed choices and help manufacturers understand what really matters to car owners.
Our dealer partners pay to use our platform for car buying and selling, but reviews and scoring on vehicle pages sourced from Driver Power surveys are completely independent and based solely on Driver Power survey data. They’re never influenced by commission or any commercial relationship.
Carwow written content.
Written and published by our independent editorial content team and displayed against the cars listed and in articles found on carwow.co.uk, evo.co.uk and carbuyer.co.uk. These review articles are completely independent and unsponsored. We do not accept any incentives from manufacturers for these written reviews.
Carwow YouTube channel - YouTube and video reviews.
Our video reviews are created to give viewers independent and informative content about the cars they’re considering. If any video car reviews are sponsored, they will be clearly marked as such.
Carwow customer reviews.
Reviews our own customers leave about their experience of using Carwow, collected and shown through Trustpilot.
Dealer reviews and ratings.
Reviews and star ratings of the dealers who sell and lease cars through Carwow, left by the people who dealt with them.
Where do Driver Power reviews come from?
Driver Power is an annual survey of new and used car owners run by the Carwow Group. Survey respondents are new and used car owners and recruited through the Carwow Group websites to provide a review on their car via a pop-up on-site, via email on Auto Express and Carwow and sometimes through our survey panel provider, Dynata.
Survey respondents are asked to rate how satisfied they are with various attributes of their car. The scores are then aggregated to calculate an average score for each model. All questions in the surveys are weighted equally to calculate the final score for the model.
Keeping it real - how we collect Driver Power reviews
We know that reviews only matter to our consumers if they’re real and trustworthy. That’s why we go the extra mile to make sure every review, score and opinion comes from genuine car owners with real experiences.
This is our criteria for respondents taking the Driver Power surveys:
- Must be aged 17+.
- Must have actually owned or experienced the car - we ask people to include their Car Reg in their reviews.
- Respondents are prevented from taking the survey multiple times using various methods, including tracking against the IP address.
- Survey answers cannot be changed after submission.
How we detect fake reviews and keep Driver Power reviews genuine
All questions in the Driver Power surveys are weighted equally to calculate the final score for the model.
- We ask respondents to leave their make, model and registration plate, and we use CAP data to check the make and model match the plate. If they don't, the review isn't counted.
- We randomly spot check survey answers. If we identify any suspicious reviews, these are excluded from scores.
Dynata, our external survey panel provider, uses QualityScore™, an AI-powered system that ensures genuine survey responses. Dynata also uses the following measures:
-
AI Detection: identifying fraud and low attentiveness missed by standard checks (e.g. bots, ghost completes or disengaged users), and replacing them in real time.
-
Behavioral Analysis: Tracks 175+ passive signals (e.g. copy-paste, response logic, time taken to complete survey and network speed) to assess respondent engagement and authenticity.
-
Device and IP Analysis: Dynata's systems assess device information and IP addresses for anomalies that could indicate attempts to obscure identity or location.
-
Pattern Analysis: Detecting illogical or uniform answering patterns, such as "straight-lining" (selecting the same answer for every question).
Are Driver Power reviews incentivised?
Sometimes we may offer an incentive (like vouchers) to consumers who participate in Driver Power surveys. Where we run incentive-based Driver Power surveys, vouchers are given upon completion regardless of the review being negative or positive. We never discriminate depending on the answers. Our laser focus is on making sure that the review is honest.
Alongside Driver Power, Carwow publish our own expert reviews and star ratings. These are the considered verdicts of our professional editorial teams at Carwow. These are independent expert assessments, produced to documented methodologies and editorial standards. In short, our editorial star ratings are:
-
Expert and experienced. They are the work of teams consisting of long-established automotive journalists with many decades of combined hands-on experience.
-
Judged in context. A car is rated against its direct rivals and what a buyer in that segment reasonably expects, not against the whole market, so an affordable model can earn top marks on merit and an expensive one can be marked down for falling short of what its price commands.
-
Independent. Ratings are never subject to approval by manufacturers, advertisers or commercial partners, and are not influenced by advertising spend, event access or any commercial relationship but judged solely on the journalists’ review of the car. Where content is sponsored, it is clearly marked as such.
-
Consistently applied and signed off. The same five-star scale is used across all categories, and no rating is a single journalist's unchecked verdict. Reviews go through an editorial sign-off process and are cross-checked against comparable models for consistency.
-
Kept under review. A rating can be revised in light of a comparison between new competitors and the model, long-term testing or a re-test, so it stays accurate as the market moves.
See here for more detail about how we test cars: https://www.carwow.co.uk/how-we-test-cars
Where do these reviews come from?
These are reviews from people who have actually bought or sold a car through Carwow, collected and displayed through Trustpilot. We invite every customer to leave one: if a customer buys a car, we send the request a few days after the purchase is reported to us, and if a customer sells a car, we send it a few days after the car is marked as collected.
Are they incentivised?
No. We don't offer any incentive for leaving a Carwow customer review, and the request is the same whether the experience was good or bad.
How do we display them?
The overall score and star rating we show reflect all of our genuine reviews, the good and the bad. On our homepage we link to our full Trustpilot profile so consumers can read every review and see the complete set of scores for themselves.
Where do dealer reviews come from?
- We only invite a customer to leave a review after there has been a genuine transaction or meaningful interaction between a customer and a dealer through Carwow. The trigger is either a completed sale the dealer reports, or an enquiry or sale the customer confirms. We then check the two against each other and against our dataset. A dealer-reported sale is verified against our own transaction data, and a seller-reported sale must be confirmed by the dealer.
- We send requests for reviews after a set period following the transaction, not at the point of sale, so reviews are less likely to be coached or pressured.
Keeping dealer reviews genuine
- Each invitation is personal to one customer and one transaction and can only be used once, so reviews can't be duplicated, passed on or farmed, and the customer can only leave one review per transaction.
- We then use a combination of automated checks and regular manual spot checks. We look for things like whether a review relates to a sale we have a record of, language that doesn't look authentic, and unusual patterns such as sudden spikes in review volume. Where a review doesn't pass these checks we remove it, and we'll also remove fake, duplicated or abusive reviews flagged through the complaints process below. We don't change the substance of a genuine review.
How dealer ratings are calculated
A dealer's star rating is calculated by taking an average of all their review ratings, with every review counting equally. We don't weight any reviews more heavily than others.
Reviews and ratings on Carwow do not affect where a dealer or OEM's offers appear or how visible they are to customers.
Where do Carwow Leasey reviews come from?
To help people considering a lease, we have invited customers who have leased a car through Carwow Leasey to share their experience. We email past Carwow Leasey customers and ask if they would be kind enough to leave a review through a short form. There is no incentive, reward or prize for doing so, and we ask simply for an honest account, whether the experience was good or bad.
How we know these are genuine customers
We only invite people we can identify as real Carwow Leasey customers from our own records, and whom we have also matched to a registered Carwow account. The form asks each customer for an identifier, so that before anything is published we can match every response back to a genuine Carwow Leasey buyer. Any response we cannot match to a real customer, and any duplicate, is disregarded and not published. Each customer's review is counted only once.
How we publish them
This is a small, manual exercise, and our team adds these reviews to the Carwow Leasey site by hand. We publish every genuine review we receive, positive or negative, and we publish it as written. We do not pick and choose which reviews to show, we do not reorder them and we do not change the substance of what a customer has said. Before a review goes live, our team checks it by hand for spam or fake content. Where the Carwow Leasey site shows an overall score, it reflects all of the reviews we have published. We keep the original form responses unedited, along with a record of what we have published, so there is a clear audit trail.
We sometimes work with trusted partners to help collect, verify or host reviews, such as Dynata for Driver Power surveys and Trustpilot for Carwow customer reviews. Those partners run their own checks, but responsibility for meeting the standards in this policy stays with Carwow.
How to complain about a review - If you are a dealer:
Please contact your Carwow account manager in the first instance, who will escalate it to the relevant internal team.
How to complain about a review - If you are a consumer:
Please contact our Customer Service team by calling 020 4586 4000 or emailing hello@carwow.co.uk. When submitting your complaint by email, please include “Fake Review Complaint” in the subject line and let us know why you believe the review is fake or misleading.
How we handle your complaints
We recognise that a review is your personal experience shared to help others, whether positive or negative. A complaint is kept separate from this and will be treated as a formal request for us to investigate and resolve a specific concern or issue you’ve had, usually prompting a response or action from us. We will never try to stop someone from leaving a negative review just because they have a complaint with us.
We will investigate all complaints fully and take appropriate action, which may include removing the fake or misleading review or banning the culpable person from leaving further reviews. If a dealer disputes a Driver Power score or review, or we identify fake reviews in the dataset, we may choose to mark it under review or remove it while we investigate.
We will review and update this policy as frequently as necessary to comply with applicable laws, regulations and internal processes.
At Carwow, we recognise that online reviews have become one of the most powerful tools that help consumers make decisions, such as buying or selling their car. We also know that reviews are only meaningful if they are genuine, unbiased, and real, which is why we take the integrity of our reviews seriously and are committed to spotting and promptly taking action against fake or misleading reviews.
This policy governs the use of reviews on Carwow, Auto Express, Evo and Carwow’s related channels such as our YouTube channel. We specifically use content from our consumer reviews powerhouse, Driver Power, to display reviews and aggregated scores on carwow.co.uk, www.carbuyer.co.uk and autoexpress.co.uk.
It also covers the other reviews and ratings we show: our editorial and video reviews, the reviews our own customers leave about Carwow and the reviews and ratings of our dealer partners.
Read below to learn how we collect, display and manage consumer reviews on our websites and what steps we are taking to stop fake or misleading reviews across our websites.
Driver Power reviews
Driver Power exists to give real car owners a voice. While manufacturers know the nuts and bolts of cars, nobody knows the quirks and perks like the owners. Driver Power provides independent, first-hand insights that help consumers make informed choices and help manufacturers understand what really matters to car owners.
Our dealer partners pay to use our platform for car buying and selling, but reviews and scoring on vehicle pages sourced from Driver Power surveys are completely independent and based solely on Driver Power survey data. They’re never influenced by commission or any commercial relationship.
Carwow written content.
Written and published by our independent editorial content team and displayed against the cars listed and in articles found on carwow.co.uk, evo.co.uk and carbuyer.co.uk. These review articles are completely independent and unsponsored. We do not accept any incentives from manufacturers for these written reviews.
Carwow YouTube channel - YouTube and video reviews.
Our video reviews are created to give viewers independent and informative content about the cars they’re considering. If any video car reviews are sponsored, they will be clearly marked as such.
Carwow customer reviews.
Reviews our own customers leave about their experience of using Carwow, collected and shown through Trustpilot.
Dealer reviews and ratings.
Reviews and star ratings of the dealers who sell and lease cars through Carwow, left by the people who dealt with them.
Where do Driver Power reviews come from?
Driver Power is an annual survey of new and used car owners run by the Carwow Group. Survey respondents are new and used car owners and recruited through the Carwow Group websites to provide a review on their car via a pop-up on-site, via email on Auto Express and Carwow and sometimes through our survey panel provider, Dynata.
Survey respondents are asked to rate how satisfied they are with various attributes of their car. The scores are then aggregated to calculate an average score for each model. All questions in the surveys are weighted equally to calculate the final score for the model.
Keeping it real - how we collect Driver Power reviews
We know that reviews only matter to our consumers if they’re real and trustworthy. That’s why we go the extra mile to make sure every review, score and opinion comes from genuine car owners with real experiences.
This is our criteria for respondents taking the Driver Power surveys:
- Must be aged 17+.
- Must have actually owned or experienced the car - we ask people to include their Car Reg in their reviews.
- Respondents are prevented from taking the survey multiple times using various methods, including tracking against the IP address.
- Survey answers cannot be changed after submission.
How we detect fake reviews and keep Driver Power reviews genuine
All questions in the Driver Power surveys are weighted equally to calculate the final score for the model.
- We ask respondents to leave their make, model and registration plate, and we use CAP data to check the make and model match the plate. If they don't, the review isn't counted.
- We randomly spot check survey answers. If we identify any suspicious reviews, these are excluded from scores.
Dynata, our external survey panel provider, uses QualityScore™, an AI-powered system that ensures genuine survey responses. Dynata also uses the following measures:
-
AI Detection: identifying fraud and low attentiveness missed by standard checks (e.g. bots, ghost completes or disengaged users), and replacing them in real time.
-
Behavioral Analysis: Tracks 175+ passive signals (e.g. copy-paste, response logic, time taken to complete survey and network speed) to assess respondent engagement and authenticity.
-
Device and IP Analysis: Dynata's systems assess device information and IP addresses for anomalies that could indicate attempts to obscure identity or location.
-
Pattern Analysis: Detecting illogical or uniform answering patterns, such as "straight-lining" (selecting the same answer for every question).
Are Driver Power reviews incentivised?
Sometimes we may offer an incentive (like vouchers) to consumers who participate in Driver Power surveys. Where we run incentive-based Driver Power surveys, vouchers are given upon completion regardless of the review being negative or positive. We never discriminate depending on the answers. Our laser focus is on making sure that the review is honest.
Alongside Driver Power, Carwow publish our own expert reviews and star ratings. These are the considered verdicts of our professional editorial teams at Carwow. These are independent expert assessments, produced to documented methodologies and editorial standards. In short, our editorial star ratings are:
-
Expert and experienced. They are the work of teams consisting of long-established automotive journalists with many decades of combined hands-on experience.
-
Judged in context. A car is rated against its direct rivals and what a buyer in that segment reasonably expects, not against the whole market, so an affordable model can earn top marks on merit and an expensive one can be marked down for falling short of what its price commands.
-
Independent. Ratings are never subject to approval by manufacturers, advertisers or commercial partners, and are not influenced by advertising spend, event access or any commercial relationship but judged solely on the journalists’ review of the car. Where content is sponsored, it is clearly marked as such.
-
Consistently applied and signed off. The same five-star scale is used across all categories, and no rating is a single journalist's unchecked verdict. Reviews go through an editorial sign-off process and are cross-checked against comparable models for consistency.
-
Kept under review. A rating can be revised in light of a comparison between new competitors and the model, long-term testing or a re-test, so it stays accurate as the market moves.
See here for more detail about how we test cars: https://www.carwow.co.uk/how-we-test-cars
Where do these reviews come from?
These are reviews from people who have actually bought or sold a car through Carwow, collected and displayed through Trustpilot. We invite every customer to leave one: if a customer buys a car, we send the request a few days after the purchase is reported to us, and if a customer sells a car, we send it a few days after the car is marked as collected.
Are they incentivised?
No. We don't offer any incentive for leaving a Carwow customer review, and the request is the same whether the experience was good or bad.
How do we display them?
The overall score and star rating we show reflect all of our genuine reviews, the good and the bad. On our homepage we link to our full Trustpilot profile so consumers can read every review and see the complete set of scores for themselves.
Where do dealer reviews come from?
- We only invite a customer to leave a review after there has been a genuine transaction or meaningful interaction between a customer and a dealer through Carwow. The trigger is either a completed sale the dealer reports, or an enquiry or sale the customer confirms. We then check the two against each other and against our dataset. A dealer-reported sale is verified against our own transaction data, and a seller-reported sale must be confirmed by the dealer.
- We send requests for reviews after a set period following the transaction, not at the point of sale, so reviews are less likely to be coached or pressured.
Keeping dealer reviews genuine
- Each invitation is personal to one customer and one transaction and can only be used once, so reviews can't be duplicated, passed on or farmed, and the customer can only leave one review per transaction.
- We then use a combination of automated checks and regular manual spot checks. We look for things like whether a review relates to a sale we have a record of, language that doesn't look authentic, and unusual patterns such as sudden spikes in review volume. Where a review doesn't pass these checks we remove it, and we'll also remove fake, duplicated or abusive reviews flagged through the complaints process below. We don't change the substance of a genuine review.
How dealer ratings are calculated
A dealer's star rating is calculated by taking an average of all their review ratings, with every review counting equally. We don't weight any reviews more heavily than others.
Reviews and ratings on Carwow do not affect where a dealer or OEM's offers appear or how visible they are to customers.
Where do Carwow Leasey reviews come from?
To help people considering a lease, we have invited customers who have leased a car through Carwow Leasey to share their experience. We email past Carwow Leasey customers and ask if they would be kind enough to leave a review through a short form. There is no incentive, reward or prize for doing so, and we ask simply for an honest account, whether the experience was good or bad.
How we know these are genuine customers
We only invite people we can identify as real Carwow Leasey customers from our own records, and whom we have also matched to a registered Carwow account. The form asks each customer for an identifier, so that before anything is published we can match every response back to a genuine Carwow Leasey buyer. Any response we cannot match to a real customer, and any duplicate, is disregarded and not published. Each customer's review is counted only once.
How we publish them
This is a small, manual exercise, and our team adds these reviews to the Carwow Leasey site by hand. We publish every genuine review we receive, positive or negative, and we publish it as written. We do not pick and choose which reviews to show, we do not reorder them and we do not change the substance of what a customer has said. Before a review goes live, our team checks it by hand for spam or fake content. Where the Carwow Leasey site shows an overall score, it reflects all of the reviews we have published. We keep the original form responses unedited, along with a record of what we have published, so there is a clear audit trail.
We sometimes work with trusted partners to help collect, verify or host reviews, such as Dynata for Driver Power surveys and Trustpilot for Carwow customer reviews. Those partners run their own checks, but responsibility for meeting the standards in this policy stays with Carwow.
How to complain about a review - If you are a dealer:
Please contact your Carwow account manager in the first instance, who will escalate it to the relevant internal team.
How to complain about a review - If you are a consumer:
Please contact our Customer Service team by calling 020 4586 4000 or emailing hello@carwow.co.uk. When submitting your complaint by email, please include “Fake Review Complaint” in the subject line and let us know why you believe the review is fake or misleading.
How we handle your complaints
We recognise that a review is your personal experience shared to help others, whether positive or negative. A complaint is kept separate from this and will be treated as a formal request for us to investigate and resolve a specific concern or issue you’ve had, usually prompting a response or action from us. We will never try to stop someone from leaving a negative review just because they have a complaint with us.
We will investigate all complaints fully and take appropriate action, which may include removing the fake or misleading review or banning the culpable person from leaving further reviews. If a dealer disputes a Driver Power score or review, or we identify fake reviews in the dataset, we may choose to mark it under review or remove it while we investigate.
We will review and update this policy as frequently as necessary to comply with applicable laws, regulations and internal processes.
Where do Driver Power reviews come from?
Driver Power is an annual survey of new and used car owners run by the Carwow Group. Survey respondents are new and used car owners and recruited through the Carwow Group websites to provide a review on their car via a pop-up on-site, via email on Auto Express and Carwow and sometimes through our survey panel provider, Dynata.
Survey respondents are asked to rate how satisfied they are with various attributes of their car. The scores are then aggregated to calculate an average score for each model. All questions in the surveys are weighted equally to calculate the final score for the model.
Keeping it real - how we collect Driver Power reviews
We know that reviews only matter to our consumers if they’re real and trustworthy. That’s why we go the extra mile to make sure every review, score and opinion comes from genuine car owners with real experiences.
This is our criteria for respondents taking the Driver Power surveys:
- Must be aged 17+.
- Must have actually owned or experienced the car - we ask people to include their Car Reg in their reviews.
- Respondents are prevented from taking the survey multiple times using various methods, including tracking against the IP address.
- Survey answers cannot be changed after submission.
How we detect fake reviews and keep Driver Power reviews genuine
All questions in the Driver Power surveys are weighted equally to calculate the final score for the model.
- We ask respondents to leave their make, model and registration plate, and we use CAP data to check the make and model match the plate. If they don't, the review isn't counted.
- We randomly spot check survey answers. If we identify any suspicious reviews, these are excluded from scores.
Dynata, our external survey panel provider, uses QualityScore™, an AI-powered system that ensures genuine survey responses. Dynata also uses the following measures:
- AI Detection: identifying fraud and low attentiveness missed by standard checks (e.g. bots, ghost completes or disengaged users), and replacing them in real time.
- Behavioral Analysis: Tracks 175+ passive signals (e.g. copy-paste, response logic, time taken to complete survey and network speed) to assess respondent engagement and authenticity.
- Device and IP Analysis: Dynata's systems assess device information and IP addresses for anomalies that could indicate attempts to obscure identity or location.
- Pattern Analysis: Detecting illogical or uniform answering patterns, such as "straight-lining" (selecting the same answer for every question).
Are Driver Power reviews incentivised?
Sometimes we may offer an incentive (like vouchers) to consumers who participate in Driver Power surveys. Where we run incentive-based Driver Power surveys, vouchers are given upon completion regardless of the review being negative or positive. We never discriminate depending on the answers. Our laser focus is on making sure that the review is honest.
Alongside Driver Power, Carwow publish our own expert reviews and star ratings. These are the considered verdicts of our professional editorial teams at Carwow. These are independent expert assessments, produced to documented methodologies and editorial standards. In short, our editorial star ratings are:
- Expert and experienced. They are the work of teams consisting of long-established automotive journalists with many decades of combined hands-on experience.
- Judged in context. A car is rated against its direct rivals and what a buyer in that segment reasonably expects, not against the whole market, so an affordable model can earn top marks on merit and an expensive one can be marked down for falling short of what its price commands.
- Independent. Ratings are never subject to approval by manufacturers, advertisers or commercial partners, and are not influenced by advertising spend, event access or any commercial relationship but judged solely on the journalists’ review of the car. Where content is sponsored, it is clearly marked as such.
- Consistently applied and signed off. The same five-star scale is used across all categories, and no rating is a single journalist's unchecked verdict. Reviews go through an editorial sign-off process and are cross-checked against comparable models for consistency.
-
Kept under review. A rating can be revised in light of a comparison between new competitors and the model, long-term testing or a re-test, so it stays accurate as the market moves.
See here for more detail about how we test cars: https://www.carwow.co.uk/how-we-test-cars
Where do these reviews come from?
These are reviews from people who have actually bought or sold a car through Carwow, collected and displayed through Trustpilot. We invite every customer to leave one: if a customer buys a car, we send the request a few days after the purchase is reported to us, and if a customer sells a car, we send it a few days after the car is marked as collected.
Are they incentivised?
No. We don't offer any incentive for leaving a Carwow customer review, and the request is the same whether the experience was good or bad.
How do we display them?
The overall score and star rating we show reflect all of our genuine reviews, the good and the bad. On our homepage we link to our full Trustpilot profile so consumers can read every review and see the complete set of scores for themselves.
Where do dealer reviews come from?
- We only invite a customer to leave a review after there has been a genuine transaction or meaningful interaction between a customer and a dealer through Carwow. The trigger is either a completed sale the dealer reports, or an enquiry or sale the customer confirms. We then check the two against each other and against our dataset. A dealer-reported sale is verified against our own transaction data, and a seller-reported sale must be confirmed by the dealer.
- We send requests for reviews after a set period following the transaction, not at the point of sale, so reviews are less likely to be coached or pressured.
Keeping dealer reviews genuine
- Each invitation is personal to one customer and one transaction and can only be used once, so reviews can't be duplicated, passed on or farmed, and the customer can only leave one review per transaction.
- We then use a combination of automated checks and regular manual spot checks. We look for things like whether a review relates to a sale we have a record of, language that doesn't look authentic, and unusual patterns such as sudden spikes in review volume. Where a review doesn't pass these checks we remove it, and we'll also remove fake, duplicated or abusive reviews flagged through the complaints process below. We don't change the substance of a genuine review.
How dealer ratings are calculated
A dealer's star rating is calculated by taking an average of all their review ratings, with every review counting equally. We don't weight any reviews more heavily than others.
Reviews and ratings on Carwow do not affect where a dealer or OEM's offers appear or how visible they are to customers.
Where do Carwow Leasey reviews come from?
To help people considering a lease, we have invited customers who have leased a car through Carwow Leasey to share their experience. We email past Carwow Leasey customers and ask if they would be kind enough to leave a review through a short form. There is no incentive, reward or prize for doing so, and we ask simply for an honest account, whether the experience was good or bad.
How we know these are genuine customers
We only invite people we can identify as real Carwow Leasey customers from our own records, and whom we have also matched to a registered Carwow account. The form asks each customer for an identifier, so that before anything is published we can match every response back to a genuine Carwow Leasey buyer. Any response we cannot match to a real customer, and any duplicate, is disregarded and not published. Each customer's review is counted only once.
How we publish them
This is a small, manual exercise, and our team adds these reviews to the Carwow Leasey site by hand. We publish every genuine review we receive, positive or negative, and we publish it as written. We do not pick and choose which reviews to show, we do not reorder them and we do not change the substance of what a customer has said. Before a review goes live, our team checks it by hand for spam or fake content. Where the Carwow Leasey site shows an overall score, it reflects all of the reviews we have published. We keep the original form responses unedited, along with a record of what we have published, so there is a clear audit trail.
We sometimes work with trusted partners to help collect, verify or host reviews, such as Dynata for Driver Power surveys and Trustpilot for Carwow customer reviews. Those partners run their own checks, but responsibility for meeting the standards in this policy stays with Carwow.
How to complain about a review - If you are a dealer:
Please contact your Carwow account manager in the first instance, who will escalate it to the relevant internal team.
How to complain about a review - If you are a consumer:
Please contact our Customer Service team by calling 020 4586 4000 or emailing hello@carwow.co.uk. When submitting your complaint by email, please include “Fake Review Complaint” in the subject line and let us know why you believe the review is fake or misleading.
How we handle your complaints
We recognise that a review is your personal experience shared to help others, whether positive or negative. A complaint is kept separate from this and will be treated as a formal request for us to investigate and resolve a specific concern or issue you’ve had, usually prompting a response or action from us. We will never try to stop someone from leaving a negative review just because they have a complaint with us.
We will investigate all complaints fully and take appropriate action, which may include removing the fake or misleading review or banning the culpable person from leaving further reviews. If a dealer disputes a Driver Power score or review, or we identify fake reviews in the dataset, we may choose to mark it under review or remove it while we investigate.
We will review and update this policy as frequently as necessary to comply with applicable laws, regulations and internal processes.
Where do these reviews come from?
These are reviews from people who have actually bought or sold a car through Carwow, collected and displayed through Trustpilot. We invite every customer to leave one: if a customer buys a car, we send the request a few days after the purchase is reported to us, and if a customer sells a car, we send it a few days after the car is marked as collected.
Are they incentivised?
No. We don't offer any incentive for leaving a Carwow customer review, and the request is the same whether the experience was good or bad.
How do we display them?
The overall score and star rating we show reflect all of our genuine reviews, the good and the bad. On our homepage we link to our full Trustpilot profile so consumers can read every review and see the complete set of scores for themselves.
Where do dealer reviews come from?
- We only invite a customer to leave a review after there has been a genuine transaction or meaningful interaction between a customer and a dealer through Carwow. The trigger is either a completed sale the dealer reports, or an enquiry or sale the customer confirms. We then check the two against each other and against our dataset. A dealer-reported sale is verified against our own transaction data, and a seller-reported sale must be confirmed by the dealer.
- We send requests for reviews after a set period following the transaction, not at the point of sale, so reviews are less likely to be coached or pressured.
Keeping dealer reviews genuine
- Each invitation is personal to one customer and one transaction and can only be used once, so reviews can't be duplicated, passed on or farmed, and the customer can only leave one review per transaction.
- We then use a combination of automated checks and regular manual spot checks. We look for things like whether a review relates to a sale we have a record of, language that doesn't look authentic, and unusual patterns such as sudden spikes in review volume. Where a review doesn't pass these checks we remove it, and we'll also remove fake, duplicated or abusive reviews flagged through the complaints process below. We don't change the substance of a genuine review.
How dealer ratings are calculated
A dealer's star rating is calculated by taking an average of all their review ratings, with every review counting equally. We don't weight any reviews more heavily than others.
Reviews and ratings on Carwow do not affect where a dealer or OEM's offers appear or how visible they are to customers.
Where do Carwow Leasey reviews come from?
To help people considering a lease, we have invited customers who have leased a car through Carwow Leasey to share their experience. We email past Carwow Leasey customers and ask if they would be kind enough to leave a review through a short form. There is no incentive, reward or prize for doing so, and we ask simply for an honest account, whether the experience was good or bad.
How we know these are genuine customers
We only invite people we can identify as real Carwow Leasey customers from our own records, and whom we have also matched to a registered Carwow account. The form asks each customer for an identifier, so that before anything is published we can match every response back to a genuine Carwow Leasey buyer. Any response we cannot match to a real customer, and any duplicate, is disregarded and not published. Each customer's review is counted only once.
How we publish them
This is a small, manual exercise, and our team adds these reviews to the Carwow Leasey site by hand. We publish every genuine review we receive, positive or negative, and we publish it as written. We do not pick and choose which reviews to show, we do not reorder them and we do not change the substance of what a customer has said. Before a review goes live, our team checks it by hand for spam or fake content. Where the Carwow Leasey site shows an overall score, it reflects all of the reviews we have published. We keep the original form responses unedited, along with a record of what we have published, so there is a clear audit trail.
We sometimes work with trusted partners to help collect, verify or host reviews, such as Dynata for Driver Power surveys and Trustpilot for Carwow customer reviews. Those partners run their own checks, but responsibility for meeting the standards in this policy stays with Carwow.
How to complain about a review - If you are a dealer:
Please contact your Carwow account manager in the first instance, who will escalate it to the relevant internal team.
How to complain about a review - If you are a consumer:
Please contact our Customer Service team by calling 020 4586 4000 or emailing hello@carwow.co.uk. When submitting your complaint by email, please include “Fake Review Complaint” in the subject line and let us know why you believe the review is fake or misleading.
How we handle your complaints
We recognise that a review is your personal experience shared to help others, whether positive or negative. A complaint is kept separate from this and will be treated as a formal request for us to investigate and resolve a specific concern or issue you’ve had, usually prompting a response or action from us. We will never try to stop someone from leaving a negative review just because they have a complaint with us.
We will investigate all complaints fully and take appropriate action, which may include removing the fake or misleading review or banning the culpable person from leaving further reviews. If a dealer disputes a Driver Power score or review, or we identify fake reviews in the dataset, we may choose to mark it under review or remove it while we investigate.
We will review and update this policy as frequently as necessary to comply with applicable laws, regulations and internal processes.
Reviews and ratings on Carwow do not affect where a dealer or OEM's offers appear or how visible they are to customers.
Where do Carwow Leasey reviews come from?
To help people considering a lease, we have invited customers who have leased a car through Carwow Leasey to share their experience. We email past Carwow Leasey customers and ask if they would be kind enough to leave a review through a short form. There is no incentive, reward or prize for doing so, and we ask simply for an honest account, whether the experience was good or bad.
How we know these are genuine customers
We only invite people we can identify as real Carwow Leasey customers from our own records, and whom we have also matched to a registered Carwow account. The form asks each customer for an identifier, so that before anything is published we can match every response back to a genuine Carwow Leasey buyer. Any response we cannot match to a real customer, and any duplicate, is disregarded and not published. Each customer's review is counted only once.
How we publish them
This is a small, manual exercise, and our team adds these reviews to the Carwow Leasey site by hand. We publish every genuine review we receive, positive or negative, and we publish it as written. We do not pick and choose which reviews to show, we do not reorder them and we do not change the substance of what a customer has said. Before a review goes live, our team checks it by hand for spam or fake content. Where the Carwow Leasey site shows an overall score, it reflects all of the reviews we have published. We keep the original form responses unedited, along with a record of what we have published, so there is a clear audit trail.
We sometimes work with trusted partners to help collect, verify or host reviews, such as Dynata for Driver Power surveys and Trustpilot for Carwow customer reviews. Those partners run their own checks, but responsibility for meeting the standards in this policy stays with Carwow.
How to complain about a review - If you are a dealer:
Please contact your Carwow account manager in the first instance, who will escalate it to the relevant internal team.
How to complain about a review - If you are a consumer:
Please contact our Customer Service team by calling 020 4586 4000 or emailing hello@carwow.co.uk. When submitting your complaint by email, please include “Fake Review Complaint” in the subject line and let us know why you believe the review is fake or misleading.
How we handle your complaints
We recognise that a review is your personal experience shared to help others, whether positive or negative. A complaint is kept separate from this and will be treated as a formal request for us to investigate and resolve a specific concern or issue you’ve had, usually prompting a response or action from us. We will never try to stop someone from leaving a negative review just because they have a complaint with us.
We will investigate all complaints fully and take appropriate action, which may include removing the fake or misleading review or banning the culpable person from leaving further reviews. If a dealer disputes a Driver Power score or review, or we identify fake reviews in the dataset, we may choose to mark it under review or remove it while we investigate.
We will review and update this policy as frequently as necessary to comply with applicable laws, regulations and internal processes.
We sometimes work with trusted partners to help collect, verify or host reviews, such as Dynata for Driver Power surveys and Trustpilot for Carwow customer reviews. Those partners run their own checks, but responsibility for meeting the standards in this policy stays with Carwow.
How to complain about a review - If you are a dealer:
Please contact your Carwow account manager in the first instance, who will escalate it to the relevant internal team.
How to complain about a review - If you are a consumer:
Please contact our Customer Service team by calling 020 4586 4000 or emailing hello@carwow.co.uk. When submitting your complaint by email, please include “Fake Review Complaint” in the subject line and let us know why you believe the review is fake or misleading.
How we handle your complaints
We recognise that a review is your personal experience shared to help others, whether positive or negative. A complaint is kept separate from this and will be treated as a formal request for us to investigate and resolve a specific concern or issue you’ve had, usually prompting a response or action from us. We will never try to stop someone from leaving a negative review just because they have a complaint with us.
We will investigate all complaints fully and take appropriate action, which may include removing the fake or misleading review or banning the culpable person from leaving further reviews. If a dealer disputes a Driver Power score or review, or we identify fake reviews in the dataset, we may choose to mark it under review or remove it while we investigate.
We will review and update this policy as frequently as necessary to comply with applicable laws, regulations and internal processes.
We will review and update this policy as frequently as necessary to comply with applicable laws, regulations and internal processes.