Which reviews can you hide? A review moderation checklist

What is review moderation for?

A review arrives that makes you hesitate. It has a swear word in it, or a customer's phone number, or it names the person who served them. Maybe it is just harsh. Review moderation is the decision you make at that moment: publish it, publish it with a change, or keep it off the page.

The decision is easier with one test. Ask what is wrong with the content, and ignore the stars. If the problem would be a problem in a five-star review too, such as spam, a phone number or a threat, hide it. If the only problem is that the customer is unhappy, publish it and answer. In the US, the FTC's rule on consumer reviews allows hiding only for reasons of that kind, and our article on the FTC fake reviews rule goes through them.

The list in the rule is short, so it is worth having in front of you. Section 465.7(b), read on 7 November 2026, does not count a review as suppressed when it is held back under criteria applied to every review alike and it contains trade secrets or confidential business information; defamatory, harassing, abusive, obscene, vulgar or sexually explicit content; someone's personal information or likeness; content that is discriminatory about race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity or another intrinsic characteristic; or content that is clearly false or misleading. Reviews you reasonably believe are fake, and reviews wholly unrelated to what you sell, are also on the list. A low rating is not.

Ten reviews: hide or keep?

Here is the test applied to ten common kinds of review.

Two of these need a little more thought. The staff review stays because the customer is describing what happened to them; the threat goes because it is no longer about the shop but aimed at a person. And the cousin's review goes for the same reason a paid one would: it was not written by a customer. In the US, reviews from staff and relatives are a matter for the FTC rule too, which is why a short note to your team saying "please don't review us" is worth sending.

What about photos, discounts and accusations?

A few reviews don't fit the ten above. These five take a bit more thought.

The parcel one is the hardest. Section 465.7 lets you withhold defamatory or clearly false content, but you are the one judging a claim about your own business, so "clearly" has to mean something you can show. With a record that shows it did not happen, hide it, note why, and keep the record. Without one, the review stays, and your reply is where you tell your side.

Can you edit a review instead of hiding it?

Do not rewrite a customer's words. Changing what a review says, even to fix spelling or soften it, turns it into your text with their name on it. The exceptions are mechanical: masking a swear word with stars, or removing a phone number, where the reader can see that something was taken out.

When a review breaks a rule in one sentence and is useful in the rest, the cleanest fix is to hide it and ask the reviewer to send it again without that sentence. Tell them which part was the problem, so they know what to leave out.

Should you write a moderation policy?

Yes, and it can be five lines. List the reasons you hide reviews, say that the same reasons apply to every rating, and keep it somewhere your team can find it. When a customer asks why their review is not up, you can point to the reason instead of improvising one. Putting the same lines where shoppers can read them, under the reviews or on your FAQ page, costs nothing and answers the suspicion that you only show the good ones.

If you sell to customers in the EU, the Omnibus Directive also expects you to tell shoppers whether and how you check that reviews come from real buyers. Our article on the Omnibus Directive and verified reviews has wording you can copy.

The UK is stricter about how you display what you keep. Paragraph 13 of Schedule 20 to the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 bans publishing consumer reviews "in a misleading way", and the examples it gives include "failing to publish, or removing from publication, negative consumer reviews whilst publishing positive ones" and "giving greater prominence to positive consumer reviews over negative ones". It also expects whoever publishes reviews to take "reasonable and proportionate steps" to keep fake ones out and to remove them.

Decide, too, who publishes and how fast. Approving every review by hand gives you the most control, but a review that waits two weeks for someone to look at it is a review the next shopper never sees. Publishing at once and hiding later is faster but puts the occasional spam online for a while. Pick the one you can keep up with.

How many reviews does Formgong hide?

Very few, and the numbers are small, so read them as a picture rather than a benchmark. On 6 November 2026 we counted, read only, the reviews on the 8 sites we run ourselves, our demo shops and test sites. There, 10 of 169 reviews are hidden, 6 are waiting and 153 are published. Of the 153 published, 47 are 1 or 2-star reviews, kept like the rest. For 5 of the 10 hidden reviews we can still read the reason: 3 were our own test reviews, 1 was marked as spam or fake, and 1 had already been hidden in the app it was imported from. The reasons for the other 5 are stored in each site's own review store, which we do not query in bulk.

Small numbers like these are why this page leans on the rules and the cases rather than on our averages.

How does moderation work in Formgong?

You pick one of four publishing modes per site: approve each review yourself, publish star ratings at once and check written reviews, publish everything at once, or, on the Pro plan, let an AI check publish reviews that pass. None of them filters by stars. The AI check is never shown the rating, holds written text only for spam, abuse, personal data or text about something else, and is told to publish criticism of staff by role or first name like any other review.

Hiding asks for one of six reasons: spam or fake, duplicate, not about your business, personal data, threats or harassment, or test. The list is the same for every rating, and only test, spam and duplicate reviews can be deleted outright, so an honest bad review can never quietly disappear. Rude words are masked on your website by default, shown as the first letter and stars, and the review is still published. In the modes that publish on their own, only three reviews a day from one visitor go out at once. Photos and videos are moderated with the review. In the AI mode each photo is checked too and held only for nudity, violence, an identity or bank document, advertising such as a QR code, or an image unrelated to a purchase, while a photo of a broken or faulty product is published like any other. In that mode a review with a video always waits for you, because the check cannot look at video. Visitors can report a review under it, and you see the count. The moderation docs show each screen, and our article on the benefits of negative reviews makes the case for keeping the low ones.

Which review made you hesitate?

If you have a review you were not sure whether to hide, send it to support@formgong.com with the names taken out. If it is a case this page does not cover, we will add it to the table.