How Reviews Are Checked

Our promise: a human reads every review first

Before any review appears on Dealers Reviews, a human moderator reads it. Not an algorithm, not a keyword filter with a rubber stamp — a person. Nothing on this site auto-publishes.

Moderation usually takes one to two days. We know that's slower than instant, and we think it's worth it. A review site is only useful if the reviews on it are real, and the only way we know to keep them real is to look at every single one.

A few ground rules keep things fair from the start: you can post one review per dealer, it has to be about your own first-hand experience, and writing a review requires a free account (an email address, a public display name, and a password — that's it). Reading reviews is free and requires no account at all.

What makes a good review

The reviews that help other buyers most share three qualities: they're first-hand, they're specific, and they stick to what happened.

"They charged me twice for the same hydraulic pump and it took three calls to get it refunded" tells a future customer something real. "They're crooks" tells them nothing — and it's the kind of statement we may have to decline, because we can't publish accusations we have no way to stand behind. Describe what happened; let readers draw the conclusion.

Details make the difference. What did you buy or bring in for service? Roughly when? How was the communication, the timeline, the price versus the quote? If you want, you can add optional per-criteria scores — parts availability, service turnaround, warranty handling, sales honesty and pricing, trade-in fairness — and optional purchase context like what you bought, the type of visit, your state, and the month and year. All of that is optional, but every detail you add makes your review more useful to the next person standing where you stood.

Good reviews aren't only complaints, either. If a dealer stayed late to get your combine running before harvest, say so. Praise that's specific is just as valuable as criticism that's specific.

What isn't allowed

We decline reviews that fall into any of these categories. Most people never bump into these rules — they exist for the small number who try to game the system.

• Reviews that aren't your own experience. Second-hand stories, "my buddy told me," things you read elsewhere — if it didn't happen to you, it doesn't belong in your review.
• Undisclosed conflicts of interest. If you work for the dealer, used to work there, or work for a competitor, that's a conflict we and readers need to know about. Reviews written to boost your own business or sink a rival's are not welcome.
• Fake or bought reviews. Reviews written in exchange for a discount, a freebie, or any incentive tied to saying something positive. Real experiences only, freely given.
• Personal or private information. No home addresses, personal phone numbers, license plates, or attempts to identify private individuals. Naming a salesperson by first name in context is normal; doxxing is not.
• Threats, hate, and profanity. You can be sharply critical without any of these. Reviews containing them are declined.
• Off-topic and promotional content. Reviews about politics, other websites, or anything other than your experience with that dealer — and anything that's really an ad — don't publish.

Verified purchase and Verified service badges

When you write a review, you can optionally upload proof of your transaction — a bill of sale or a work order. Here's exactly what happens to it:

The document is private. Only a moderator sees it. It is never published, never shown to the dealer, and never shared. The moderator checks that it matches your review — right dealer, plausible transaction — and grants a "Verified purchase" or "Verified service" badge if it does.

Then the document is deleted. Shredded, gone. We don't keep a copy, we don't build a file on you. After the moderation decision, the only thing that remains is the badge on your review.

The badge tells readers something simple and valuable: a real document confirmed this person was actually a customer. Reviews without a badge are still welcome and still moderated the same way — plenty of honest reviewers don't keep paperwork, and that's fine. The badge is extra weight, not a requirement.

What we honestly don't check

We want to be straight with you about the limits of what moderation can do, because a trust page that overpromises isn't a trust page.

When we verify a document, we confirm the document — not the underlying dispute. A "Verified purchase" badge means "this is a real customer of this dealer." It does not mean "we investigated the disagreement and took the reviewer's side." We weren't in the room. We can't rule on whether the trade-in offer was fair or whether the warranty claim should have been honored.

Every review on this site is the opinion and account of the person who wrote it, not a finding by us. We check that reviews are first-hand, on-topic, and within our guidelines; readers should weigh them the way they'd weigh any first-hand account — alongside other reviews, the dealer's response, and their own judgment.

How ratings work

A dealer's overall rating is the average of their published reviews' star scores (1–5 stars), plus averages for any optional per-criteria scores reviewers chose to give.

Two rules keep those numbers honest. First, we don't show an average rating at all until a dealer has at least three published reviews — one glowing review (or one furious one) is an anecdote, not a rating. Second, we never round up. A 4.4 displays as a 4.4, not "4.5 stars." The number you see is the number the math produced.

What happens when a review breaks the rules

If your review is declined during moderation, you'll be told why — not with a form letter that says "guidelines violation," but with the actual reason, so you can fix it and resubmit if you want. "They're crooks" declined for an unsupported accusation can come back as the specific, publishable story of what actually happened.

If a review that already published is later found to break the guidelines, we remove it — but nothing on this site vanishes silently. Every removal leaves a public, dated record on the dealer's page saying that a review was removed and when. If a dealer's page looks quieter than it used to, you'll be able to see why. We built it this way on purpose: silent deletions are how review sites lose the public's trust, one quiet edit at a time.

How dealers can respond — and what they can never buy

Dealers get a fair shake here too. Public dealer responses — where a verified dealership replies to a review of its business — are rolling out soon, because readers consistently tell us a calm, factual response to a critical review says more about a dealership than a page of five-star praise. In the meantime, dealers can reach us directly.

If a dealer believes a review breaks our guidelines — it's about the wrong business, the person was never a customer, it contains something prohibited — they can dispute it through our process by presenting evidence. A moderator weighs it and decides. Sometimes disputes succeed; when they do, the removal still leaves the public dated record described above.

What a dealer can never do, at any price: buy a better placement, buy a badge, pay to remove or edit a review, pay to change a rating, or pay for early access to anything. There is no premium tier that bends these rules, and no sales call that can reach our moderators. That's not a policy we might revisit — it's the foundation of the site. Read the full commitment in our Independence Charter at /our-promise.

Fake reviews, review-gating, and the FTC

US law backs up what common sense already says: fake reviews are illegal, and so are the sneakier tricks around them. Our rules are built to align with the FTC's standards on consumer reviews, and we hold ourselves and dealers to them:

No fabricated reviews — not by dealers about themselves, not by anyone about a competitor, not generated in bulk by anyone or anything. No incentivized-for-positive reviews — offering a customer something of value in exchange for a positive review (rather than an honest one) is prohibited. No review-gating — steering happy customers toward the review form while quietly diverting unhappy ones somewhere private is a distortion of the record, and we treat it as one. And no suppression — reviews are never removed, buried, or reweighted because they're negative. A review's star count has nothing to do with whether it stays up; only the guidelines decide that.

If you see something that looks like fake or manipulated reviewing on this site, tell us at support@dealers-reviews.com. Reports like that get a human's attention, same as everything else here.

Ready to write yours?

If you've bought equipment, a truck, a trailer, an RV, a boat, a machine, or a mower from a US dealership — or had one serviced — your experience is exactly what the next buyer is searching for. It takes a few minutes: create a free account, tell your story the way it happened, add a photo or proof of purchase if you like (we strip location data from photos automatically, and proof documents are seen only by a moderator, then deleted).

A real person will read it, usually within a day or two, and then it joins the public record — where no one can pay to make it disappear.

Write a review today. Questions first? We're at support@dealers-reviews.com, and privacy questions or deletion requests go to privacy@dealers-reviews.com. This page explains our practices in plain English; it works together with our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, and where they differ, those documents govern. [Company legal name] operates Dealers Reviews from [Mailing address — to be set by owner].