Fake Reviews and UK Law in 2026: What the CMA's First Investigations Mean for Local Businesses
Since 6 April 2025, fake reviews have been a banned practice under UK consumer law. For most of the first year the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) wrote to businesses and published guidance. On 26 March 2026 it opened its first formal investigations under the new rules, into five businesses including Just Eat, Autotrader and Dignity. None of them is a high-street trade, but the practices being examined are ones any local business could slip into: staff writing reviews, discounts for five stars, and quietly keeping the bad reviews out of sight.
What the law bans
The rules come from the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (the DMCC Act), and the CMA explains them in its fake reviews guidance. In short, it is banned to write, commission or publish a fake review, to publish a review that hides that it was incentivised, and to present reviews or ratings in a misleading way, for example by leaving out the negative ones. Offering a service that does any of this is banned too, which covers anyone selling review packages.
The CMA can now enforce this itself, without first going to court. A business found to have broken consumer law can be fined up to 10% of its global turnover or £300,000, whichever is higher.
The five investigations, and what they look like locally
The CMA announced the cases on 26 March 2026 and has been clear that no finding of wrongdoing has been made against any of them. What it is examining is still a useful map of where the line sits.
Dignity: whether staff were asked to post positive reviews of its crematoria services. The local version is the owner, a relative or an employee leaving a five-star review, or asking friends to. Even an honest opinion misleads customers when it's presented as coming from an ordinary customer.
Pasta Evangelists: whether customers were given discounts on future orders for leaving five-star reviews, without that being disclosed. The local version is "10% off your next clean if you leave us a review", printed on a receipt or sent by WhatsApp.
Autotrader and Feefo: whether some one-star reviews were left unpublished and not counted in star ratings. The local version is review gating: sending customers a "How did we do?" form first, then pointing only the happy ones to Google.
Just Eat: whether its ratings system pushed up some restaurants' and grocers' star ratings. That case is about a platform rather than a single business, but it shows the CMA is looking at how ratings are displayed, not only at who writes the reviews. If your website shows a star rating, it should match your real reviews; our post on review stars in Google search covers the technical side of that.
The CMA's case pages say the next updates are due over winter 2026 to 2027.
Where Google's rules go further than the law
This is the part most owners get wrong. UK law allows incentivised reviews as long as the incentive is clearly disclosed. Google's policy doesn't allow them at all. Offering a discount, a freebie or a prize-draw entry in exchange for a review, a changed review or the removal of a negative one is prohibited on Google, disclosed or not. Google also bans discouraging negative reviews and asking only selected customers for positive ones, which is review gating by another name.
So a "leave a review, get 10% off, and say you got it" scheme could be lawful in the UK and still get your reviews removed from Google. Google says it can also restrict a profile that breaks these rules, for example by blocking new reviews for a set period. For most local businesses, Google's rules are the ones that bite first.
What you can still do
Ask every customer. The safest review process is also the simplest: after every completed job, every customer gets the same request with a direct link, whether you think they're happy or not. There's no gating if there's no filter.
Ask them to describe the job, not to give five stars. "It really helps if you mention what we did for you" is fine. Telling them what to write, or drafting it for them, isn't.
Reply to every review, especially the bad ones. A calm, specific reply to a one-star review does more for the next reader than hiding it could, and you can't delete a Google review yourself anyway. You can report reviews that break Google's rules, such as ones from people who were never customers.
Check what your own website shows. Testimonials should be real quotes from real customers who agreed to be named, and a hand-picked set of five-star quotes shouldn't be presented as your overall rating. Star ratings in your site's structured data should match your real profile. Our reviews and reputation service works inside these rules.
Steer clear of anyone selling reviews. Packages of Google reviews, review-swap groups and agencies that write reviews for you are a banned service under UK law as well as a breach of Google's rules, and the business that buys them carries the risk.
This is a summary of the CMA's published guidance and Google's policy as they stood in October 2026, not legal advice. If you're unsure whether a scheme is lawful, the CMA's guidance is written for businesses and is the best place to start.