Legal

Can you hide bad reviews? Where curation ends and deception begins

18 October 2026 · JustReview

You can hide a review on your own website, but not because it is bad. Removing spam, duplicates, reviews about a different business, unlawful content or someone else’s personal data is curation; removing one and two-star reviews to lift the rating you display is the practice that US, EU and UK consumer rules go after, above all when the average and count still look complete. On JustReview, where hiding a review requires a reason picked from a fixed list, businesses hid 37 reviews in the twelve weeks to 18 October 2026, and every single one had four or five stars. Here is where the line runs, what hiding actually does to a displayed rating, and how to curate without crossing it.

The short answer, by what you want to hide

Most questions about hiding reviews come down to one test: would the review still be hidden if it said the same thing with five stars? If yes, you are cleaning. If no, you are filtering by sentiment.

The middle ground is a review about something you have genuinely stopped selling. Hiding it is easy to defend if you would also hide a glowing review of the same discontinued product. If you would keep the glowing one, the reason is the rating, not the product.

Where the rules draw the line

None of what follows is legal advice, and local law adds detail. But the three regimes most of our customers sell into agree on the shape of the line, which makes it easier to stay on the right side.

United States. The FTC’s rule on consumer reviews (16 CFR Part 465) has applied since 21 October 2024. Its suppression section does not ban a hide button. It bans using groundless legal threats, intimidation or false public accusations to stop or remove a negative review, and it bans implying that the reviews you display are all or most of the reviews you received when some were held back because of their rating or negative sentiment. It also lists grounds that are not suppression when you apply them to every review regardless of sentiment: defamatory, harassing, abusive, obscene or discriminatory content, content wholly unrelated to what you sell, reviews that are clearly false, and confidential information. We walked through the whole rule, penalties included, in FTC rules for customer reviews.

European Union. Since 28 May 2022, the Omnibus Directive has put misrepresenting consumer reviews to promote products on the list of commercial practices that are unfair in every case, with no need to prove harm. The European Commission’s guidance gives publishing only the positive reviews and deleting the negative ones as a plain example. A trader that shows reviews must also tell visitors whether, and how, it checks that they come from real customers.

United Kingdom. The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act has banned fake reviews and misleading review practices outright since 6 April 2025. The CMA’s guidance counts suppressing negative reviews and cherry-picking positive ones for publication among them, and it treats overall ratings and summaries as review information too, so a star average built on a filtered set is in scope.

Read side by side, the rules share one idea. Removing a review is not the offence. Presenting what is left as the honest record, when it was selected by rating, is. That puts most of the risk not in the review you hide but in the number that sits above the remaining ones.

What hiding does to the rating you display

To see how strong the temptation is, we took every Google review set on JustReview with at least ten visible reviews on 18 October 2026: 2,352 sets holding 212,929 reviews. Then we asked what the displayed average would become if the business hid every one and two-star review and showed the rest.

One and two-star reviews make up only 3.84% of those reviews, and 51.7% of the sets have at least one. Small as that sounds, hiding them would change the rating shown to one decimal place on 45.6% of all sets. The gain depends almost entirely on where a business starts:

A typical business rated in the low fours could add half a star by hiding about one review in eight. Of the 664 sets that show less than 4.8 today, 488 (73.5%) would jump to 4.8 or higher. That is the whole commercial case for filtering, and it is why the rules focus on the number rather than the button.

The same table shows why filtering rarely survives contact with a curious visitor. The rating goes up, but the count goes down, by 13% in the four-point band and by over a quarter below four. A widget that says 4.8 from 87 reviews, next to a Google profile that says 4.3 from 100, invites exactly the comparison you were hoping to avoid. Count mismatches already have innocent causes, like plan limits and API windows, which we measured in why review counts do not match. A mismatch you created on purpose is much harder to explain.

What businesses hid when they had to give a reason

Since 28 July 2026, hiding an imported review in JustReview requires one of five grounds: removed at the source, duplicate, unlawful or abusive, not about my business, or contains a third party’s personal data. There is no “other” option. Every hide is logged with its ground and the review’s star rating, which lets us report what people actually do with the switch rather than what they say they do.

The switch for Google, Facebook and other imported reviews is unlocked on 714 accounts. On 406 of them, widgets display 414,905 imported reviews, and 259 of those accounts hold 18,276 visible one and two-star reviews, 13,115 of them one-star. Here is everything they hid in the twelve weeks to 18 October 2026, leaving out our own demo and test accounts:

Not one of the 18,276 low-rated reviews within reach was hidden. In the same weeks, seven reviews were switched back on, mostly from businesses’ own review forms, where new reviews wait hidden until the owner approves them.

The contrast with the earlier period is the part worth thinking about. Our database still holds 233 hidden one and two-star imported reviews on nine accounts, and none of them has an entry in the log, which means all of them were hidden before a ground became mandatory. We cannot prove the fixed list caused the change, because twelve weeks and a handful of active curators is a small sample and many of those 714 accounts are quiet. What the data does show is that when the question “why?” has to be answered at the moment of the click, the answers so far have all been ones the rules allow. It also cannot see the bluntest form of filtering, which is not connecting a source with poor reviews in the first place.

Curation that stays on the right side

A few habits cover almost every case.

Hide only on grounds you can name. If the honest answer to “why this one?” is “because it is one star”, leave it. If it is spam, a duplicate or about someone else, hide it and move on.

Keep a record. A note of what you hid, when and why, written at the time, is worth more than any policy page written after a complaint. Rules that carve out abusive or unrelated reviews still expect you to show that the carve-out is why the review went.

Let the numbers follow what is shown. Your displayed average and count should be computed from the reviews on the page, so they move when you hide something. Never pair a filtered set with the platform’s headline rating or total. The same goes for star markup: see review schema and stars in Google.

Sorting is not hiding, but do not let it pretend. Putting your best reviews first in a slider of six is a showcase, and visitors understand showcases. Keep the full set reachable and the average honest, and avoid headings that call a selection “all reviews”.

Answer instead of hiding. A calm public reply to a fair one-star review does more for trust than its absence. Our guide on how to respond to negative reviews has templates. If a review is genuinely fake, the fix is at the platform: how to remove a fake Google review.

How Review Curation works in JustReview

If you want a hide switch without the legal exposure, the safest version is one that asks the right question at the moment of the click, and that is how ours is built. Before you confirm, a window shows how your displayed rating and review count for that source will change, with a warning when hiding the review would raise the rating. You then pick one of the five grounds above, and the change is stored together with the rating before and after. The average and count in your widgets are recalculated from the reviews you leave visible and your cached widgets are refreshed at once, so what visitors see always matches what is shown. There is no setting that filters reviews by star rating, and switching a review back on needs no reason. Step by step instructions are in turning individual reviews on and off.

What to know before you rely on it: hiding imported reviews is part of the Ultimate plan at 39 € a month, while reviews from your own on-site form can be moderated on every plan. Hiding affects only your website, never Google, Facebook or any other source, where the review stays public and counted. And the fixed list stops a ground you cannot name, not a ground you misstate: the record shows what you chose, and the choice remains yours.

The simplest way to stay on the right side is to show the reviews you have, all of them, with the rating they actually add up to. Start with the Google reviews widget, add the other platforms your customers use, and compare plans on the pricing page. The free Basic plan shows up to 100 Google and Facebook reviews in the badge widget, and the testimonials layout on this page starts with Plus at 9 € a month. To see your own reviews on your site in a few minutes, create a free account.