Customer Testimonials: Proving They Are Genuine

The rule entered the Act Against Unfair Competition when Germany transposed the European modernisation directive, and it consists of a single sentence. Section 5b(3) UWG provides: „Macht ein Unternehmer Bewertungen zugänglich, die Verbraucher im Hinblick auf Waren oder Dienstleistungen vorgenommen haben, so gelten als wesentlich Informationen darüber, ob und wie der Unternehmer sicherstellt, dass die veröffentlichten Bewertungen von solchen Verbrauchern stammen, die die Waren oder Dienstleistungen tatsächlich genutzt oder erworben haben." In English: where a trader makes accessible reviews that consumers have carried out with regard to goods or services, information on whether and how the trader ensures that the published reviews originate from consumers who have actually used or purchased those goods or services counts as material. Two words carry the whole weight: whether and how. The law does not prescribe a check. It prescribes that you say whether you check, and if so, by which route. A business that openly writes that it does not verify the origin has met the duty - it only loses the trust argument the block was built for in the first place.

The consequence sits one provision earlier. Material information must not be withheld: under Section 5a(1) UWG a trader acts unfairly if they mislead a consumer „indem er ihm eine wesentliche Information vorenthält" - by withholding material information that the consumer needs in the circumstances for an informed transactional decision and whose absence may lead them to a different decision. A review block with no statement of origin at all is exactly that case. The visitor reads the stars as a statement about real jobs, and that assumption is left uncorrected. That reviews carry so much weight is no accident - they belong to the trust signals on a website that decide the visit before the first sentence is read.

It gets sharper the moment the business expressly claims the reviews are genuine. The annex to Section 3(3) UWG lists practices that are always unlawful towards consumers - no balancing, no threshold. Number 23b covers the claim that reviews of a product or service come from consumers who have actually purchased or used it „ohne dass angemessene und verhältnismäßige Maßnahmen zur Überprüfung ergriffen wurden" - without reasonable and proportionate steps having been taken to verify it. The popular line that all reviews come from real customers is therefore no longer a figure of speech but a claim that has to be carried. Whoever writes it down has to walk the route behind it.

The information has to sit where the reviews sit. A paragraph in the privacy policy does not meet the duty, and neither does a line in the footer: material information must not be provided in an unclear or hard-to-reach way, and a notice three screen heights away is both. What works is a line directly under the heading of the block or a short text immediately below it, in the same type size as the quotes themselves and no smaller.

The wording may be plain. It has to answer two questions: whether you check and how. What it must not be is an advertising line that claims more than the business does. „Verified reviews" as a seal over an unverified block is precisely the constellation that number 23b covers. A collapsible area that hides the notice is risky too if the block itself is visible immediately - the information belongs on the same level of visibility as the stars.

Technically this is a text element attached to the component, not to the individual page. If the review block sits on the home page, on three service pages and on the reference page, then the notice has to come along in all five places without anyone maintaining it five times. That is precisely where it fails in practice: the sentence gets added once on the home page and the copies on the sub-pages stay unchanged. Setting up reviews as a reusable component solves the problem once - the same logic used everywhere else in conversion optimisation.

Not every page gets better with testimonials. Three sentences from six years ago, with no date and no link to a service, carry less than one good project description. A business with only two pieces of feedback is better off showing two detailed references with task, solution and result than a carousel block turning the same two sentences in circles. And anyone who can no longer reconstruct the origin has only one clean choice anyway: empty the block and rebuild it, rather than writing a notice above it that is not true.

There are also cases where the block does not belong on the page even with impeccable origin. In the medical professions, the advertising rules of the sector restrict third-party statements and letters of thanks far more tightly than competition law does - what applies there is set out in practice websites: what medical professions may show. Self-written or invented quotes are out of the question in any case: they fall under number 23c of the annex, and that route never pays off in any calculation. The damage is not confined to the legal position; it hits the credibility of every other statement on the page.

Star ratings deserve particular caution. Marking reviews up as structured data so that they appear as stars in search turns a design element into a statement in the results listing - with the same requirements for origin and completeness. Stars a company awards itself are not provided for there. What the markup can and cannot do is set out in rich snippets for local businesses.