Seven Reviews You Never Received Are Already in Your TrustScore

An independent letting agency opens its Trustpilot profile after a good month and finds a rating that does not match the reviews underneath it. Every visible review is five stars. The score is four.

Nothing is broken. Trustpilot's weighted average includes seven neutral reviews at 3.5 stars for every business, so that all companies start from a balanced position; the effect fades as real reviews accumulate (Trustpilot, TrustScore and star rating explained, retrieved 13 September 2026). Those seven exist on every profile in the world, including the competitor whose rating looks unbeatable.

That one design decision explains most of what feels wrong about Trustpilot in the early months. A small number of excellent reviews is outnumbered by the baseline. A larger number is not.

What actually moves the number

The TrustScore runs from 1 to 5 and is explicitly not a simple average. Alongside the seven-review baseline, two other factors do the work (same source):

Time span. Newer reviews carry more weight than older ones, because they indicate current satisfaction rather than historical satisfaction.

Frequency. Since recent reviews weigh more, the score is most stable when reviews arrive regularly, and Trustpilot states plainly that whether a company asks for reviews can affect the TrustScore.

How much weight each factor carries is not published, so nobody outside Trustpilot can calculate the score in advance. The direction is clear enough to act on: a burst of reviews followed by a long silence is worth less than the same number arriving steadily, because the burst ages while the silence lasts.

Two further details are worth keeping:

• Where a review came from does not change its weight. The calculation does not distinguish between verified, invited, and unprompted reviews, and it is identical regardless of industry or whether the business pays for a subscription.
• If one customer reviews you several times, only their most recent review counts toward the score. All of them stay visible, and you can reply to each.

Below 10,000 reviews the score is recalculated immediately after each new review arrives.

You may already have a profile

A Trustpilot page does not require your participation to exist. Trustpilot's own description: "Even if the business doesn't exist on Trustpilot yet, a consumer can add the web URL and create the business profile themselves," and "Consumers can always leave a review for free, with or without an invitation" (Trustpilot, How Trustpilot works, retrieved 13 September 2026).

So the first task is not deciding whether to use Trustpilot. It is searching for your own domain and finding out whether the decision was made for you some time ago, possibly by a customer who was annoyed enough to set the page up themselves.

Consistency is the rule, and consistency is hard

Trustpilot wants businesses to ask for reviews. Its Guidelines for Businesses (June 2026) attach one condition that catches careful companies rather than careless ones: invitations must go out consistently, "inviting everyone in the same way, and at the same point in the customer journey."

Consider how that plays out in a support team. A ticket closes; the agent who handled it decides whether to attach the review link. Nobody instructs them to skip the difficult cases, and nobody needs to. Over a quarter the link goes out with the easy resolutions and quietly does not with the messy ones, and the profile ends up describing a company that does not exist. Trustpilot names this directly: picking and choosing which customers you invite, targeting only satisfied customers, and pre-screening people on the quality of their experience are all prohibited.

The fix is structural rather than motivational. If the invitation is triggered by the system at a fixed point, nobody has to decide anything, and the rule is satisfied by construction.

The rest of the boundary, from the same guidelines:

• One invitation per experience, not a reminder sequence.
• Genuine experience required. The people you invite must have actually bought something or used the service.
• No incentives connected to writing or editing a review, including discounts, codes, and refunds.
• No inviting people with a special relationship to the business: close family, people working in or with the company, shareholders.
• No leading language. The guidelines cite "If you like us, please leave us a 5-star review" as the example to avoid; wording must be fair, neutral, and unbiased.

That last one is where good intentions do the damage, because the warm phrasing and the biased phrasing are usually the same sentence. Asking for a review passes. Asking for a good review does not.

What the free plan actually covers

A surprising number of businesses never answer a critical review because they assume replying sits behind a subscription. It does not.

Trustpilot's free plan carries 50 invitations a month, with templates, ecommerce integrations, the Automatic Feedback Service, or invitations you create by hand. It qualifies your site for Google's store ratings, which add stars to Google Ads campaigns. From the dashboard you can reply publicly to reviews, flag the ones you believe breach the guidelines, and set up notifications when a new review arrives. You get the Review Collector widget for your own site, and full access to the help centre (Trustpilot, Use Trustpilot for free, retrieved 13 September 2026).

Read that list again with an eye on what is missing rather than what is there, because everything in it is a reaction. The one hard ceiling is the invitation count. Fifty a month covers a clinic or a trades business comfortably and runs out in the first week for a shop shipping hundreds of orders. The paid question is a volume question, and it has nothing to do with whether you are allowed to defend yourself.

The three-day question

Trustpilot offers one move that Google does not. If you do not recognise a reviewer, you may ask them for information that identifies the transaction: a name, a reference number, an email address, or a phone number. Trustpilot tells them they have three days to respond, though reviewers choose whether to reply and share their details (Guidelines for businesses, June 2026, retrieved 13 September 2026).

This is built for the review that does not fit anything in your records. A firm that took over the client list of a competitor inherits their history along with it, and complaints about work done under the previous owner land on the new profile. Disputing them reads as evasion. Asking which job, and when, does not.

If the answer comes, there is usually a real problem to fix. If it does not, the guidelines name the next step themselves: flag the review for not being based on a genuine experience.

Flagging, and what it costs to flag wrongly

Trustpilot lists the grounds on which a review can be flagged: harmful or illegal content such as hate speech, threats, or defamation; personal information about others; advertising, promotion, scams, or spam; reviews that do not reflect a genuine experience; and reviews clearly intended for a different business.

Enforcement runs in both directions. Flagging incorrectly or inconsistently is treated as misuse, and Trustpilot's stated responses to misuse include blocking or suspending features, terminating the account, placing a Consumer Warning on the profile, hiding the TrustScore, and taking legal action.

Which rules out the reflex. A one-star review that is unfair, badly argued, or simply wrong is not a violation, and reporting it as one puts your own profile at risk to remove a single line of text. The reply costs nothing and is read by everyone who arrives afterwards.

Is a second profile worth the hour?

Google decides whether people find you. Trustpilot answers a later question, from someone who has already found you and is working out whether to hand over money. That question gets asked properly when the service is expensive, paid up front, or runs for months, and barely at all when someone is choosing where to have lunch.

So the test is not how well known the platform is. It is whether your customers pause before committing. If they do, the profile is worth claiming, and after that replying is free.

For businesses running both, Regiofy pulls the reviews into one place. Trustpilot and Tripadvisor are included from the Filialen plan upward, with both unlocked during the fourteen-day trial; the Lokal plan carries Google alone. A Trustpilot connection is made per location using your domain. Anything at two stars or below raises a notification, as does a review that reads badly despite a better score, and draft replies are generated within your monthly allowance for you to check and adjust before posting them on the platform yourself. From the Filialen plan the response rate is broken out per platform, which is how most people discover that one profile has been tended carefully and nobody has opened the other since spring.

Sources: Trustpilot, TrustScore and star rating explained; Trustpilot, Use Trustpilot for free; Trustpilot, Guidelines for businesses (June 2026); Trustpilot, How Trustpilot works. All retrieved 13 September 2026.