People have been doing this for years on Amazon and it’s estimated that up to a third of online reviews are fake. We’re not going to link to these sites to boost their SEO profile, but if you want to take a look at them it’s clear that there’s a market for black hat, non-organic app store rating activity.įake reviews aren’t limited to the app store, either. Companies like BuyAppStoreReviews, BestReviewApp, and AppRebates promise reviews to help you climb to the top of the app stores. Fiverr has thousands of people offering reviews in exchange for $5. With the broader acceptance that ratings and reviews affect an app’s ranking, plenty of sites and services have popped up offering reviews for a price. Both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store have made multiple changes to their ranking algorithms over the past year and some of the most recent shifts have clearly increased the importance of app ratings so the benefit of faking reviews is growing larger. For the past several years, we’ve noticed that a number of “top” app publishers appear to be paying people to create fake reviews, hoping that it’ll help them boost their app store conversion rates and move them up the charts.Īnecdotally, faking reviews and gaming the app stores seems to be a practice that is getting used more broadly.

Sometimes they take shortcuts in an attempt to game the top charts. Unfortunately, some ambitious app publishers aren’t limiting their activities to just white hat organic strategies. Black Hat App Store activities take aim at App Ratings

This means investing in tools like Apptentive for in-app feedback and retention and poring over in-app analytics, attempting to glean important insights that will unlock another step up in growth.

The app stores are more competitive every day and app publishers are looking for more intelligence and organic advantages in order to build a sustainable mobile business.

Fake reviews on google