Review Checker

Fakespot alternative: how to check Amazon reviews yourself

Updated

For about ten years a shopper with doubts could paste an Amazon link into Fakespot or ReviewMeta and get a letter grade. Mozilla closed Fakespot on July 1, 2025, and ReviewMeta stopped responding in 2026 according to software directories. The methods they used were never secret, though. Most of what they measured you can measure yourself, and the rest a small tool can do on the page you already have open.

What happened to Fakespot and ReviewMeta

Fakespot started in 2016 and was bought by Mozilla in 2023. In May 2025 Mozilla announced that it would shut the site, the apps and the extensions on July 1, 2025, to focus on Firefox. ReviewMeta, the other well known checker, had already been struggling and its site has been answering with a server error for much of 2026. Both worked the same way: their servers downloaded the product's review pages and ran statistics on them. That design is also why they were fragile. Amazon changes its page layout often, limits how many reviews a visitor can see without signing in, and its conditions of use forbid automated data gathering. A tool that reads the page in your own browser, only when you ask it to, avoids most of that.

Seven signs of fake Amazon reviews

One: a large share of reviews without the Verified Purchase mark. Unverified reviews are not fake by default, but paid reviews are often unverified because the product was sent for free. Two: a burst. If half of a product's reviews arrived within two weeks and the rest trickle in, something happened in those two weeks. Three: short five-star reviews. Great product, works as described, five stars. Real buyers write like that too, so look at the share, not at one review. Four: repeated phrases. Three reviewers who all say super easy to set up and great value for money in the same order probably got the same brief. Five: the product name written out in full inside the review text, several times. People say it, sellers say Acme 12-inch Stainless Steel Wok. Six: a rating chart with lots of five-star and one-star reviews and almost nothing in between. Polarized charts show up when fake fives are fighting real ones. Seven: reviews that praise something the product does not have, or that are clearly about a different item. None of these signs alone proves anything. Several of them together on one product is what the old tools were scoring.

A five-minute routine without any tool

Open the product page and click the link to all reviews. Sort by most recent instead of top reviews, because the top ones are the ones most people have voted for and the most likely to have been pushed. Scroll through the dates and note whether they cluster. Filter to one-star reviews and read five of them: they tell you what breaks, and whether the complaints are about the product or about shipping. Filter to Verified Purchase only and see whether the average changes. Look at the seller name under the price: a brand sold by Amazon itself is not immune, but a new third-party seller with a hundred five-star reviews in a month deserves a second look. If you want the counting done for you, the checker on this site takes the reviews you copy and does exactly these steps, with the numbers shown.

Open the tool

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