A competitor leaves your restaurant a fabricated one-star review. A sacked ex-employee writes a revenge review of a shift that never happened. Someone with a grudge posts the same paragraph about your food hygiene that they have posted about four other businesses on the same street. Every restaurant owner who has been through it asks the same question sooner or later: is that even legal? In the UK, the answer is now a clean yes-it-is-illegal — and it has been since 6 April 2025. Here is what the law actually says, who enforces it, and what you can realistically do with it.
The short answer
Writing a fake review, paying someone to write one, or publishing reviews you have not taken reasonable steps to verify is a banned practice under UK consumer law. The rules are in the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, and the fake review provisions came into force on 6 April 2025. Before that date, fake reviews were already actionable under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 as misleading commercial practices — so this is not a new principle, but the new Act made it explicit, gave the regulator direct fining powers, and put the whole fake review trade squarely in scope.
What exactly is banned
The Act prohibits a business from:
- Submitting or commissioning fake reviews — paying for, arranging, or writing reviews that do not reflect genuine customer experiences, including reviews of competitors.
- Publishing without reasonable checks. A site or platform that publishes consumer reviews must take reasonable and proportionate steps to verify they are genuine.
- Concealing incentives. Reviews that were paid for or incentivised must be disclosed clearly — hiding that a review was commercially incentivised is itself the banned practice.
- Offering fake review services. Advertising or offering to write or commission fake reviews is banned, which hits the sellers directly.
The enforcement picture matters as much as the rules. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) can now investigate and fine directly, with penalties that can reach up to 10% of a business's global turnover — no need for a court case first. Trading Standards enforces locally. And the CMA has a track record in this exact area: it has spent years pressuring major review platforms to detect and remove fake reviews, and it has gone after websites that sell fake reviews outright.
Does that get your review removed? Not by itself
Here is the honest caveat: UK law does not have a button on Google's review form. Google has its own review policy and its own reporting and appeal process — and that process is still your fastest route for an individual fake review. What the law changes is the context: it strengthens a legal letter, it gives you a regulator to report fake-review sellers to, and it means the person posting fake reviews about you is knowingly breaking the law, which changes the calculus for them enormously. For the step-by-step Google process itself — flagging, categories, evidence, appeals — our guide to dealing with fake Google reviews is the practical playbook, and its public response wording matters tonight, whatever the law does next month.
What you can actually do with the law
- Report to Google first. Policy-based removal is faster than any legal route, and the evidence you gather (reviewer profile patterns, wrong details, your booking records) serves both processes.
- Report the seller, not just the review. If you can see who is behind a fake review campaign — a review-selling service, an agency, a pattern of attacks on local businesses — you can report it to the CMA through its complaints channel. The CMA acts on fake review trading; one restaurant's report is thin, but patterns across several businesses get attention.
- Trading Standards. For a local matter — a competitor paying for fake reviews, an ex-employee campaign — your local Trading Standards service takes complaints through Citizens Advice. This is slower, but it creates a record, and that record helps every other route.
- The defamation route for serious cases. If a fake review is defamatory — it makes false factual claims about hygiene, safety, or criminality — a solicitor's letter can go to the reviewer and to Google's legal removal channel. This is the nuclear option: proportionate for a fabricated hygiene claim, absurd for a fake complaint about cold chips.
- Document everything. Screenshots with dates, the reviewer's public profile, your booking and order records. Every route above runs on the same evidence file.
The uncomfortable mirror: the law applies to you too
The same Act that protects you also constrains you, and it is worth being precise about where the lines are. Buying reviews is illegal — the seller and the buyer are both caught (and beyond the law, it fails on its own terms: why buying reviews hurts your restaurant covers the mechanics). Staff reviews of their own workplace are conflicts of interest. Incentivised reviews are not automatically illegal, but the incentive must be disclosed clearly; an undisclosed freebie for a five-star review is exactly the concealed-incentive practice the Act bans. And review gating — showing only your happy customers a review link — is the practice most likely to unravel: it creates an unnatural review pattern, violates Google's policy alongside consumer law, and puts the whole profile at risk rather than one review.
None of this stops you asking every customer for a review. That is not just legal, it is the strategy the law effectively rewards: genuine, unfiltered, steady volume. Our guide to getting more reviews honestly covers the mechanics, and keeping your Google Business Profile healthy is the foundation under all of it.
Why this law exists
The CMA spent years documenting how fake reviews distort markets: consumers make choices on the strength of reviews, so fake reviews are not just an insult to a business — they are a fraud on the customer. That is why the 2024 Act was written with fake reviews named explicitly rather than left to general misleading-practice rules. A restaurant owner dealing with a fabricated review is the visible victim, but the law is aimed at the ecosystem that makes fabrication cheap. Reports from real businesses are how the regulator sees the ecosystem.
The practical summary
Fake reviews about your restaurant are illegal in the UK as of April 2025, and the writing, commissioning and buying of them are all banned practices with serious penalties. But your first move is still the practical one: screenshot the evidence, reply publicly and calmly, report it to Google under the right policy category, and appeal with evidence if rejected. Bring in the CMA, Trading Standards, or a solicitor when there is a campaign or a defamatory claim — and make sure your own review collection is unimpeachable, because the strongest position is a profile so full of genuine reviews that a fake one cannot do real damage.
Revly makes genuine reviews effortless: a QR code that opens the review flow instantly, each customer writing on their own phone in their own words — no filtering, no gating, nothing to conceal. (Revly is currently running a free pilot — the first 50 cafés get everything free.) See it yourself on the demo page or get in touch.