Fakespot shuts down today after 9 years of detecting fake product reviews

I did search around looking for alternatives and the landscape isn't great. There's ReviewMeta.com which doesn't work 100% of the time and is no longer actively maintained as far as I can tell.

TheReviewIndex.com I didn't find to be very helpful, as it doesn't index all products and sometimes just refuses to check on listings you ask it to. It seems to have some kind of subscription model, but they don't list the price and offer some kind of enterprise model that doesn't sound like it has anything to do with checking reviews.

SearchBestSellers.com isn't for checking individual products, but it will show you the top sellers for each category so you can get an idea of what could be good in the category you're looking for

Camelcamelcamel.com is a price watch tool that will also show you some historical info on a product & notify you if you sign up and want to be emailed when a price drop occurs

There are a few others on AlternativeTo that weren't there the last time I checked. https://alternativeto.net/software/fakespot/

On Reddit, some people were mentioning alternatives, including asking ChatGPT about the product and it might have some kinda helpful advice, but nothing like Fakespot offered. https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1ktm4g4/now_that_f...

If you use something else, have found a good alternative or a particular prompt you've tried in your favorite LLM to get info on an Amazon product, let us know!

I mentioned it briefly in the blog post, but this is exactly what I'm working on! Essentially, a spiritual successor to Fakespot that combines LLM analysis, more traditional ML techniques, and rule-based heuristics to detect fake reviews. I'll likely go the "subscription with generous free trial" route, to avoid meeting the same fate as Fakespot.

I'm actively working on a prototype and have a landing page at https://www.truestar.pro if you want to get notified about when I launch.

I saw that actually. I mentioned in another post on here recently that I figured that the only way a Fakespot v2 could exist is with a subscription model, but on the other hand, it's probably not something I could afford. Good luck with it though! You could always try advertising & affiliate links as a test to monetize the service as well.

Thanks! Advertising is certainly a possibility, though I'm not sure using affiliate links in the browser extension itself will be an option. I know Google recently changed their policy on how browser extensions can manipulate affiliate links after the Honey scandal: https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/23/24328268/honey-coupon-co...

Yeah, probably not in the extension itself. But, Fakespot, on their web based reviews, had listings to alternative or better rated products than the one you were searching for. Possibly a bit of a conflict, but as far as I'm aware, it's the only way Fakespot was monetized.

Please help me understand why a subscription to your service should be a valuable addition to my monthly spend.

I buy extensively from Amazon across a number of product categories. My order history shows purchases as far back as 2005 (though I cannot be sure given I remember buying things in 1998 while in college, probably on a different account). During the intervening 20 years I can count on one hand the number of products I ordered which weren’t legitimate, matched my—admittedly moderate expectations for any commercial product—or included overhyped reviews.

I’d be interested in a service like yours if I could understand how the cost would cover itself in benefits.

Hmm I can see the angle

Subscription seems wrong, will prevent adoption

Should show me something instantly, I should be able to paste in a url

Attribution revenue is what I would consider the gold standard for these types of services.

It makes sense on paper, if the service helps confirm legitimate reviews for you and convinces you to purchase said product, they should receive attribution revenue for helping generate the purchase.

The reality is much much messier though, because often times the people who award attribution revenue have a conflict of interest against any service that could even potentially expose bad practices happening on their marketplace.

I once worked for a popular deal site that developed a price tracking extension, a certain marketplace threatened to completely ban us from attribution revenue and we had to kill the extension over night despite our users loving it.

I’ve basically settled on only buying major brands that I already know from Amazon unless it’s something that I’m okay throwing away if it doesn’t work out. I then judge by my assessment of the bad reviews.

IMHO judging these random Chinese products with the nonsense capital letter brands by actual reviews is a lost cause.

Yeah same here. The sad thing is that even with this Amazon is still better than most of the competition.

>I’ve basically settled on only buying major brands that I already know from Amazon

I wouldn't even do that, unless you can't find it anywhere else. Amazon commingles their returns form 3rd party sellers and Amazon direct. So you might order an item, find out it was actually a broken returned item, and then have Amazon call you a liar.

I really don't think this is going to work well, like how is an LLM going to know someone paid me for my review?