We often encourage people to prioritize book reviews over star ratings, because book reviews are more substantial.
What if I give a novel one star because it has flying pigs and I can’t stand them, but you love flying pigs? If you stop at the star rating, you will avoid the book. But if you read the review, you will buy the book.
A good review tells you why a reader loved or hated a book, and that feedback can inform your purchasing decisions. But does that mean book reviews are infallible? Can you trust them to provide an accurate overview of a reader’s opinions and experiences? Unfortunately, no.
Fake reviews have become disturbingly commonplace, although some people would argue that they have been with us for decades. But those arguments primarily refer to review bombing, which is where people flood a book with negative reviews because they hate the author or the book’s message/subject matter.
The opposite is just as problematic (readers throwing glowing reviews at a book they have not even read because they support the author’s social and political beliefs). However, those cases are fairly tame in comparison to the current trend where authors use freelancers, firms and automated bots to generate fake reviews.
Unlike review bombing, fake reviews in 2025 are commercial tools. In other words, I publish a novel that won’t sell because no one knows who I am; so, I hire an expert to give my manuscript 40,000 five-star reviews on Goodreads, Amazon, and every other book-related platform.
This hurts consumers in the short term, especially casual readers. The same individuals who use AI to churn out poorly written and poorly plotted books will also use bots to conjure fake reviews, tricking consumers into spending their hard-earned money on terrible literature.
Such schemes will harm legitimate authors in the long run because they give their blood, sweat, and tears to produce beautifully written manuscripts with the hope of garnering enough positive reviews and ratings to attract mainstream attention.
But if consumers no longer trust book reviews and ratings, the glowing reviews your book has attracted may repel readers who have been trained to perceive overly positive feedback on Amazon and Goodreads as a sign of fake reviews.
One 2022 study in the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services highlighted this risk. It noted that fake reviews will eventually hurt the market by eroding consumer trust in online reviews.
This explains an August 2024 press release from the Federal Trade Commission in which it announced regulations prohibiting businesses from misleading the public by either publishing fake AI-generated reviews or paying people to write and publish fake reviews.
They also expect reviewers to reveal any material connections they have to companies whose products they’ve reviewed. For instance, if a company paid for your vacation to Greece and now you’ve given their newest toaster a glowing review, you must reveal your relationship to that company, just in case their material rewards have influenced your reviews.
So, if you are thinking about using fake reviews to boost your book sales, you may incur hefty penalties. On the consumer side, readers should learn to distinguish between real and fake reviewers.
AI-generated reviews use bland, repetitive, generic language. Bots will also post large numbers of positive reviews within a short period. Look at the timestamps. If 100 overly positive reviews appeared at the same time or within minutes of each other, be suspicious. Pay attention to the reviewer’s profile.
A profile that appears today and then proceeds to post hundreds of reviews within hours or days should concern you. Some fake reviews will inevitably sneak through your filter. The safest option is to make your purchases based on recommendations from a group of readers you trust or popular online book reviewers known for their honesty.