Can you remove negative Trustpilot reviews?

Yes, when the review breaks Trustpilot’s guidelines. Trustpilot removes a review a business flags only for one of five reasons: not based on a genuine experience, harmful or illegal, personal information, advertising or promotional, or about a different business. A review that is negative, harsh or unfair in your view does not meet any of them, and Trustpilot’s Guidelines for Businesses say it does not remove a review because a business finds it unfair or critical.

The most common question is who counts as a genuine reviewer. Trustpilot’s Guidelines for Reviewers allow anyone over 18 with a recent experience, which Trustpilot says typically means within the last 12 months. A purchase is not required. Two groups are not eligible: people offered an incentive for the review, such as a discount, refund or prize draw entry, and people with a special relationship to the business, such as the owner, immediate family, an employee, a shareholder or a competitor.

A dispute about what happened is not a reason on its own. Trustpilot takes a neutral stance and does not get involved in factual disputes between a reviewer and a business unless the law requires it. Defamation sits under “Harmful or illegal”, only businesses can report it, and Trustpilot limits it to a false statement that harms a reputation and leads to significant financial loss. Whether to go to court is a separate decision for you and a lawyer (can you sue for a fake review). Its guidelines also say a paid plan gives a business no control over removal.

Our review monitoring and Review Auto-filer read Google Business Profiles only, so for Trustpilot you send us the links to the reviews in the chat. Trustpilot is the third most common platform in our removals, after Google and Reddit; Google is about 9 in 10 (TrustReviews data, October 2026). We file all your bad reviews. You pay for the ones that come down. Your account manager confirms the price and the terms with you before anything is filed, and Trustpilot decides each one.

Trustpilot can put a removed review back if the reviewer edits it or sends documentation. If that happens, we file it again at no charge and never bill twice for the same review (can removed content come back). For a review that stays up, a public reply is the tool Trustpilot recommends (how to respond to negative reviews). How to flag a review yourself, and the penalties for flagging misuse, are on our Trustpilot review removal page.