What is the Intelligent Trust Mark?

Authentic Reviews

The Bazaarvoice Intelligent Trust Mark is a symbol of your brand’s commitment to authentic, trustworthy user-generated content (UGC). It signals to shoppers that the reviews displayed on your product pages have passed Bazaarvoice’s rigorous authenticity standards — backed by industry-leading fraud detection, global moderation policies, and real-time eligibility rules.

Unlike static badges, the Intelligent Trust Mark dynamically evaluates both native and syndicated content on each product page, ensuring the reviews consumers read meet our highest standards for transparency and authenticity.

What does Intelligent Trust Mark mean for shoppers?

Shoppers rely on ratings and reviews, and other UGC, to make confident purchase decisions. But as fraudsters become more sophisticated, protecting authenticity is more important than ever.

The Intelligent Trust Mark is a visual symbol that the reviews are real, unmanipulated, and verified. It eliminates hesitation, reduces skepticism, and reinforces trust at the moment of purchase.

Learn more at Bazaarvoice University.

What is the Bazaarvoice Authenticity Policy?

We know the trust consumers place in ratings and reviews is tied directly to authenticity. That’s why, at Bazaarvoice, we’ve made it our mission to safeguard the authenticity of the reviews people depend on to make informed purchase decisions. We believe that reviews should represent the genuine, unbiased, and transparent opinion about the author’s experience with a product or service.

Our Authenticity Policy is about making sure consumers are confident they can trust the authenticity of the reviews they encounter every day across the web on sites that carry the Authentic Reviews Trust Mark.

The policy has been used as the model for WOMMA’s authenticity guidelines in its Code of Ethics. Bazaarvoice is also a lead participant with AFNOR in Europe, helping to create governing rules for user-generated content, including a certification process.

We back our Authenticity Policy with:

  • Industry-leading fraud detection technology that allows us to identify the submission source of all reviews;
  • Sophisticated algorithms, alerting and filtering capabilities that allow our moderation teams to identify, flag and report suspicious content; and
  • A dedicated team of analysts that monitors suspicious reviews to determine their authenticity.

The Bazaarvoice Authenticity Policy has three main criteria that must be met for authentic review content displayed on the websites of Bazaarvoice clients:

Free from fraud and spam

Commercially reasonable efforts are taken to help prevent the submission of fraudulent content from any submission source. This could include disruptive or ‘trolling’ behavior, commercial messages, automated submissions (e.g. bots and scripts), illegitimate or degrading content from a client’s competitor, and self-promotion.

Free from edits, classification, and alteration

Reviews are not altered in any way by anyone other than the original author — including corrections for spelling or grammar. Reviews are not filtered, edited, or deleted simply because they are negative or are lower rated.

Transparent

We do not allow companies to directly ask for positive reviews. If consumers are offered money or promotional material (such as discounts or coupons) in exchange for providing an unbiased review, then the review must note this fact.

Further, employees and vendors of the organization may not submit content without disclosing their relationship to the product or service.

Please click here for more details about the Bazaarvoice Authenticity Policy »

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is eligible for the Intelligent Trust Mark?
A Bazaarvoice Display customer with the latest (V2) hosted display or clients with Conversations API. Clients on older displays need to upgrade their display to the latest version. Learn more about the benefits of our V2 display and how to upgrade at Bazaarvoice University.

Clients must be in good standing with our content operations team. If a client displaying the Intelligent Trust Mark is flagged for inauthentic behaviors, the Intelligent Trust Mark will be removed from their display.

What criteria does Intelligent Trust Mark use to determine whether it should be displayed on a given PDP?
The Intelligent Trust Mark evaluates each PDP in real time using a combination of data signals, shopper behavior patterns, and moderation compliance. Every review displayed, hosted natively or syndicated, is analyzed through a dynamic calculation that determines if the overall content meets Bazaarvoice’s authenticity threshold. If the authenticity status changes based on newly added or removed content, the Trust Mark will automatically appear or disappear to reflect the current integrity of the PDP’s review set.

Is there a charge/fee for the Intelligent Trust Mark?
No Bazaarvoice invests in Authenticity because we believe protecting the integrity of UGC is a responsibility to shoppers and our industry, not an upsell.

Why isn’t the Intelligent Trust Mark displaying on my PDPs?
There are a number of reasons the Intelligent Trust Mark may not be appearing on your page. Please reach out to the Bazaarvoice support team, or your point of content to understand what steps are required for display.