When you compare treadmills, racks or exercise bikes, star ratings and customer reviews often decide the shortlist. Since 2025, UK consumer law has treated certain review practices as banned outright. This article summarises what the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) guidance says, what sellers who publish reviews are expected to do, and how a buyer can use that knowledge when reading a listing. The guidance is issued by the CMA, the UK consumer regulator, and appears to apply UK-wide. It concerns reviews on retailer and marketplace listings, not editorial or sponsored content, which is a separate issue.
What is now banned
The CMA’s short guide for businesses publishing consumer reviews identifies three prohibited categories:
- Fake reviews: reviews that look or claim to be genuine but are actually fake.
- Concealed incentivised reviews: reviews that fail to disclose an incentive, such as money or another benefit, for example a free stay at a hotel.
- False or misleading review information: for example, aggregated ratings based on fake reviews, or misrepresented review data.
The government’s announcement of the new regime says the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 includes an explicit ban on posting and commissioning fake reviews, added to the list of banned practices. It came into force in April 2025.
What sellers who publish reviews must do
The guide says businesses that publish reviews must implement a set of controls:
- Published policies that clearly prohibit fake reviews and state the business’s position on incentivised reviews.
- Risk assessments that regularly evaluate how likely it is that banned content could appear.
- Detection processes to identify suspicious reviews before publication.
- Investigation procedures for flagged content.
- Authority to remove content and impose consequences, such as putting clear warnings on pages or banning users.
Responsibility sits with the trader. The guide states that each individual trader who publishes reviews and review information is responsible for preventing and taking steps to remove banned content, and that businesses remain accountable even when they use third-party monitoring services. Measures must be “reasonable and proportionate”, judged by factors such as the type of platform, the volume of reviews, whether users can submit reviews and risks specific to the market.
What the CMA can do
According to the government announcement, the CMA can decide for itself whether consumer protection law has been infringed rather than going through the courts, and can act directly, including through consumer redress and fines. It can fine up to 10% of a company’s global turnover for infringements. The announcement lists fake reviews and drip pricing among areas the CMA had already targeted with enforcement markers.
What this means when you read a listing
The rules do not make every review trustworthy, and they do not promise that a fake review will be caught before you read it. What they do is give you clearer questions to ask:
- Does the retailer say how it handles reviews? Published policies are part of what the guide expects, so a site that says nothing about fake or incentivised reviews is worth noting.
- Are incentivised reviews labelled? Undisclosed incentives are banned, so a review that was written in exchange for a free product should make that clear.
- Is the overall score built on a healthy spread of reviews? The ban on misleading review information covers ratings that rely on fake reviews or misrepresented data, so a score is only as good as the reviews behind it.
- Do the reviews describe the equipment itself? For a machine you will use for years, detail on assembly, noise, stability and how it holds up is more useful than a one-line verdict. Treat generic praise with caution.
Cross-checking beyond the listing
Because a single review source can be manipulated or skewed, compare what buyers say on the retailer’s page with what appears on independent forums and in reviews on other retailers’ sites. Look for the same points being made in the same detail across sources. When two or three unconnected sources agree about, say, a wobbly frame or a fault in the console, that carries more weight than any star average. The reverse also applies: if the only praise appears on a single page, and the specifications elsewhere do not match what is claimed, that gap is a reason to keep looking.
Also separate complaints about delivery, courier damage or customer service from complaints about the product itself. A low rating caused by a delivery problem says little about how a treadmill or rack performs once assembled, while a run of complaints about the same component points to something about the product.
Reporting suspected fake reviews
The government pages read for this article describe the obligations and enforcement powers but do not set out a step-by-step consumer complaints route. If you believe a listing carries fake reviews, the sensible first step is to use the retailer’s own reporting tool for reviews, since the guide says traders must have processes to investigate flagged content. Keep a note of the listing and the reviews you are concerned about in case you want to raise it further.
The bottom line
Since April 2025, UK consumer law bans fake reviews, concealed incentivised reviews and misleading presentation of review information, and traders who publish reviews must take reasonable and proportionate steps to prevent and remove them. The CMA can fine up to 10% of global turnover. For buyers, that supports a cautious approach: check whether the seller explains its review policy, look for labelled incentives, favour detailed reviews and confirm claims across independent sources before paying for expensive equipment.