A review site is a website where customers post feedback about the products, services, or businesses they've used. These aren’t to be confused with publications that commission professional critics to test and rate products.
A 2026 BrightLocal survey found that 97% of consumers read reviews before choosing a local business, and 93% have gone on to make a purchase after reading reviews.
This guide covers the top review sites for store owners, along with strategies for getting more positive customer reviews.
Benefits of customer reviews
Customer reviews are a classic form of earned media, and they benefit small businesses through the concept of social proof: the tendency to base our decisions on the actions and opinions of other people. Specifically, consumer reviews can benefit businesses because they can help:
- Boost credibility: Forty-nine percent of consumers say they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from people they know.
- Improve local search ranking: Google factors review count and review score into local search ranking, so collecting reviews can help your business show up higher in local search results and on Google Maps. Reviews also help you identify keyword phrases to include in your SEO marketing.
- Improve your brand's reputation: Positive reviews help prospective customers view your company and may even influence people’s purchase decisions. They can instill greater customer loyalty among returning customers.
- Strengthen your competitive edge: In Shopify's Q4 2025 survey of store owners, 43% of cited brand reputation as a competitive advantage*.
Best review sites for businesses
The review sites customers use depend on the type of business they’re researching; as such, the options below are grouped by category.
General and local platforms like Google and Yelp cover a wide range of businesses, while. ecommerce and marketplace platforms focus more closely on individual products and purchases. Industry-specific sites cover categories like restaurants, healthcare, and business-to-business (B2B) software.
General and local platforms
These platforms cover a broad range of businesses rather than one product category or niche. Many also organize listings by location, so they’re more relevant for people when they're searching for a business nearby.
When you set up a Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business), your business can appear on Google Maps and receive public reviews from Google users.
Google supports three types of customer ratings and reviews:
- Business Profile reviews: These are the star ratings and comments anyone with a Google account can leave on your Business Profile, visible on Google Maps and in Search results.
- Google Customer Reviews: This is a program in Google Merchant Center that surveys customers after checkout. The feedback can contribute to a store rating badge for your site and ratings shown in Search and Shopping ads.
- Product Ratings: This aggregates reviews of your individual products, often pulled in through a reviews app or aggregator, and can display star ratings directly on your Shopping ads and free listings.
You can build up Business Profile reviews by directing customers to your Google listing. The Google & YouTube sales channel syncs a Shopify catalog with Google Merchant Center, so you're not managing listings by hand.
Yelp
Yelp specializes in local search, so it's useful if your business has a physical location. Ecommerce businesses are listed as "ineligible” in Yelp's own eligibility guidelines, along with certain business-to-business (B2B) and direct-seller businesses. That means your online store may not qualify for a Yelp page.
Yelp pages can also appear prominently in search results, sometimes ahead of a business’s own website.
Yelp actively discourages businesses from asking customers for reviews. Solicited reviews are more likely to get caught by its recommendation software and hidden from your public page, where they won't count toward your star rating. Businesses using Yelp should therefore let reviews come in on their own than to prompt customers directly.
Trustpilot
Trustpilot is an independent review platform where anyone can look up a company, read what past customers have said, and see its overall TrustScore out of five. By the end of 2025, Trustpilot reported 361 million active reviews on the platform, up 20% year over year, and 1.3 million businesses that had claimed their profile.
Trustpilot supports two types of reviews:: feedback about a business as a whole (how it handled their order, shipping, or customer service), and reviews of individual products.
Getting started is free. Any business can claim its Trustpilot profile at no cost, which lets you see your reviews and reply to them directly. Paid plans add tools like automated review invites sent to customers after purchase, customizable review widgets, and deeper reporting on customer feedback.
Either way, Shopify store owners can connect their store to Trustpilot to start collecting and displaying reviews.
Better Business Bureau
The Better Business Bureau (BBB) is a nonprofit organization that rates companies on an A to F scale, and offers paid accreditation to businesses that meet its standards. These ratings and accreditations can show whether a business is reliable and trustworthy, and whether it proactively addresses customer complaints.
Facebook Business Pages can display customer recommendations. Facebook uses Recommendations rather than a star rating. Visitors to your page are asked whether they’d recommend your business; they answer a simple “yes” or “no,” and can then add tags describing their experience along with photos or a written comment. You can turn Recommendations on for your page and encourage happy customers to leave one after a purchase or visit.
Ecommerce and marketplace platforms
These are review sites built for ecommerce, with feedback coming from people who bought through the platform. Instead of general business reviews, you'll find ratings tied to specific product listings, shipping speed, and the overall purchase experience.
Product reviews on your own store
When someone buys a product that's eligible for Shop, they can leave a review inside the Shop app, and merchants can't opt out of receiving them. To display them on your online store, pair Shop with one of the supported partner apps: Judge.me, Loox, Okendo, Stamped.io, or Yotpo.
Once that's connected, reviews collected in Shop sync automatically over to your storefront through the partner app, and they'll carry a "Verified by Shop" badge so shoppers know they’re tied to real customers.
It works the other way too: reviews your partner app collects can also show up in the Shop app, as long as they're linked to a verified customer, order, and product. And from your Shopify admin, you can reply to reviews, adjust when review request notifications go out, and report reviews that break Shop's guidelines.
Amazon
Every product page on Amazon displays reviews, including a star rating of 1 through 5 and written feedback, often with photos or video attached. Reviews from confirmed buyers carry a "Verified Purchase" badge, and other shoppers can mark reviews as helpful.
Amazon forbids offering people rewards for reviews with a single exception:Amazon Vine. Here, Amazon (not the seller) identifies and invites trusted reviewers, called Vine Voices, to try out enrolled products.
Sellers make units available, Vine Voices request and receive them free of charge, and in return they share an honest, unbiased review. Amazon says Vine can boost sales by an average of 30%, and is particularly useful for getting initial reviews for new products.
Industry-specific review sites worth claiming
Some industries have dedicated review sites that customers use before buying, booking, or hiring.
Claiming a listing verifies a business’s connection to a profile and lets the business manage available profile features. In a 2025 Shopify survey*, 41% of food and beverage store owners named positive customer reviews a first-year achievement, significantly higher than store owners in other categories.
Here's where to start, depending on what you sell:
| Business type | Where to claim a listing | Who should prioritize it |
|---|---|---|
| Restaurants and food service | OpenTable, Tripadvisor, Google | Any restaurant, café, or food business taking reservations or walk-ins |
| Hotels, tours and experiences | Tripadvisor, Booking.com, Viator | Hospitality and travel-experience businesses |
| Home services and trades | Angi, Houzz, Thumbtack | Contractors, tradespeople, and in-home service providers |
| Healthcare | Healthgrades, Zocdoc, Vitals | Clinics, practices, and individual healthcare providers |
| Legal services | Avvo, Martindale-Hubbell | Law firms and individual attorneys |
| B2B software and services | G2, Capterra, TrustRadius | Software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies and B2B service providers |
| Hiring and employer brands | Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn | Any business actively hiring or building an employer brand |
Businesses in regulated industries, such as healthcare and legal listings, may face extra rules. Some platforms need you to verify a license number before you can claim a profile, and professional bodies like state bar associations or medical boards may restrict how you're allowed to solicit, respond to, or display reviews. Check your industry's advertising and solicitation rules first.
How businesses can get more online reviews
In a Q4 2025 Shopify survey of store owners, 53% of store owners cited word of mouth as their most common Year 1 growth strategy.* Online reviews extend word of mouth to shoppers who don't know your business personally yet. But before you chase reviews everywhere at once, it helps to know where to start.
If you run a local or service-area business, prioritize the Google Business Profile where local searches show your reviews right beside your Maps listing.
If you sell online only, review channels tied to ecommerce are a better starting point.
Asking people to leave you reviews on sites is a marketing strategy in and of itself. Here are four strategies for nabbing yourself some positive ecommerce reviews.
1. Ask past customers
Reaching out directly is one of the simplest ways to get more reviews. In BrightLocal's “Local Consumer Review Survey 2026,” 28% of US consumers said they always write reviews when a business asks, up from 16% a year earlier, and 83% of consumers who were asked went on to leave one.
Reach out to past clients by email newsletter, text, or phone, and ask them to review your business. Make it easy for them by sending a link that takes them straight to your review page.
2. Encourage photo and video reviews
Not every customer wants to sum up their experience in writing, and that's fine; plenty of review platforms let them show it instead.
Sites like Amazon support photo and video uploads as part of their review process, so customers can add images or a short clip alongside their star rating and text. There are other review sites and store-based review apps that offer the same option.
Remind your customers it's entirely up to them how they leave feedback, whether that's a few sentences, a couple of photos of the product in use, or a quick video walkthrough. These can double as content for your own marketing channels.
3. Embrace niche review sites
Rather than rely on general-purpose sites like Google, you can focus on sites that cover your particular niche industry. Think of musical equipment reviews on Sweetwater, or pet supply reviews on PetSmart. You can also encourage engagement by joining forums like Reddit, where users may talk about your business.
Although Reddit doesn't host formal business reviews, its communities can surface customer recommendations and discussions about brands and products.
4. Ask without offering incentives
Major platforms often prohibit incentivized reviews, regardless of what federal law technically permits.
Google prohibits any incentive tied to a review under its Fake Engagement policy: discounts, gift cards, free products, contest entries, whether the review is positive or negative. Any violations can mean review removal, a warning on your Business Profile, or profile suspension.
Yelp also discourages solicited reviews of any kind, and Amazon bans incentivized reviews outright (apart from Amazon Vine reviews).
That's slightly different from what federal law says. The FTC's Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule doesn't ban incentivized reviews outright. The rule permits discounts or free items in exchange for reviews as long as you don't require or imply that the review has to be positive to earn the reward.
The FTC rule does prohibit paying specifically for 5-star reviews or offering rewards only when feedback is positive. Violations can carry civil penalties of around $53,000 per violation.
With this in mind, keep it simple: send a direct link to your review page by email, text, or in person after a purchase without offering an incentive. If a business does use incentives on a platform that permits them, the incentive shouldn’t be tied to what the review says. Check the specific platform's policy first.
This isn't legal advice, and platform policies change often. Businesses planning an incentive program should consult a lawyer familiar with FTC advertising rules.
What review sites mean for AI search visibility
Reviews aren't just something people read directly on a listing page anymore. When someone asks an AI assistant for a restaurant recommendation or a local service provider, the answer often draws information from the review platforms covered in this guide.
Review-platform data can also feed AI-powered products. Yelp signed an agreement with OpenAI to extend its review content into the AI ecosystem, and Foursquare's business listings power apps including OpenAI and Apple Maps, reaching people who may never actually visit Foursquare directly. In both cases, an AI assistant’s answer can share the same listing data that’s on a review site.
Shoppers are already using AI this way. In a survey of more than 18,000 consumers across 23 countries, 33% said they use AI to interpret reviews as part of their buying journey, second only to researching products (41%) among the shopping uses of AI the study measured, and ahead of hunting for deals (31%).
For businesses, review sites and listings can now double as inputs for both direct visitors and AI tools. An accurate, current listing on a platform like Google, Yelp, or Foursquare isn't just for the person browsing that site directly anymore.
Review sites FAQ
What are the top 10 review websites?
Ten widely-used platforms include Google, Yelp, Facebook, Trustpilot, BBB, and Amazon, plus industry-specific ones like Healthgrades for healthcare or G2 for B2B software.
What are the most trusted review sites?
There isn't a single, sourced ranking of "most trusted" across all platforms and industries. The most relevant platforms vary by what customers are evaluating; for example, general businesses, healthcare providers, or B2B software.
Should businesses respond to reviews?
Businesses can respond to both positive and negative reviews. Responding to your customers on review sites demonstrates you are actively engaged in your business and care about the client experience. It also helps forge a more personal connection between you and those customers, and this can lead to repeat business.
What if someone leaves a false review?
If you believe a review violates a platform’s policies, report it to platform moderators. The platform will determine whether the review qualifies for removal.
Can you pay customers to review your products?
It depends on the platform. Google, Yelp, and Amazon all prohibit incentivized reviews (Amazon has one narrow exception via Amazon Vine). Federal law is less strict: the FTC's Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule allows incentives as long as you don't require or imply the review must be positive. Since platform rules are often stricter than the law, check the specific site's policy before offering anything.
*Based on a 2025 survey of 500 Shopify merchants conducted in English across Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United States. Respondents were established merchants with 2+ years on the platform. Results reflect the experiences of this specific sample and may not be representative of all merchants.
