Are review platforms required to disclose when a business has paid for its placement?

The short answer is yes, though the quality of that disclosure varies enormously in practice. The Federal Trade Commission’s guidelines on endorsements and the 2024 Trade Regulation Rule on Consumer Reviews and Testimonials both require that paid placements be clearly and conspicuously disclosed. What “conspicuous” means in practice has been a consistent area of enforcement debate, because platforms have an obvious financial incentive to make those disclosures as unobtrusive as possible. If you see a result labeled “Ad” or “Sponsored” in small gray text you almost didn’t notice, that is technically a disclosure — but it’s designed to function more like a legal shield than a genuine consumer alert.

How does Trusti determine which businesses appear at the top of search results?

On Trusti, ranking is driven by genuine community activity: the number and quality of reviews from real consumers, the number of follows a business has received, and the volume and authenticity of referrals generated within the community. No business can purchase a higher position. A business that has been enthusiastically recommended by a hundred people in your neighborhood will appear above a business with a smaller genuine footprint, regardless of how much either business spends. This is the core structural difference between community-driven discovery and pay-to-play discovery.

I’ve been using the same review platform for years. Is there really a problem with what I’ve been seeing?

Not necessarily for every search or every business you’ve found. Many good local businesses do appear on pay-to-play platforms, and not every highly ranked result is there because of ad spend. The problem is more subtle than that: you have no reliable way to know which results reflect genuine community trust and which reflect a financial arrangement you weren’t told about. That uncertainty is a real cost to your decision-making, even if some of the results happen to be good. A platform that makes that uncertainty structurally impossible is a more reliable tool, not a marginal improvement.

Can a business on Trusti ever buy better visibility?

No. Trusti’s model is designed so that business visibility is determined entirely by community participation — real consumer reviews, follows, and referrals. There is no advertising tier, no promoted placement, and no upgrade path that changes a business’s position in search results. This isn’t just a policy choice; it’s built into the architecture of how discovery works on the platform. The businesses that rise in Trusti are the ones that have earned the trust of actual consumers in their community.

What happens to my review on Trusti — can the business respond to or suppress it?

Your review on Trusti is yours. Businesses can engage with reviews — responding professionally is part of good community participation — but they cannot suppress, hide, or remove reviews through any payment or platform relationship. Trusti’s consumer-first model means that the community’s voice remains the primary driver of information on the platform. The absence of a financial relationship between the platform and businesses means there’s no mechanism by which spending changes the fate of your honest review.