Reviewer Guidelines

Reviews on Smartreview AI are not comments — they are evidence. Verified customer reviews power the Integrity AI pillar, which contributes 50 of the 100 points in a partner's Trust-IQ Score™. Because that score carries certification weight, our standards are deliberately higher than a typical review site's.

Three principles govern everything below:

1. Verified, not anonymous-by-default. Every review is tied to a real person with real usage of the product. Verification happens privately; publication is anonymized.
2. Experience, not opinion at large. We ask about what you did and observed with the product — implementation, utility, support, value — not what you have heard.
3. Un-buyable. No partner can pay to add, remove, promote, suppress, or reorder a review. Billing has no access to scoring — this separation is enforced in our architecture, not just our policy.

Eligibility is about genuine, current, first-hand use — in your real professional role.

• You have personally used the product in a professional capacity — hands-on use, administration, procurement, or implementation. Trials count if substantive; demos and sales pitches do not.
• Your experience is current or recent. Older experience is weighted lower over time and eventually retired from the live score, so update your review as your experience evolves.
• You review in your actual role. Our survey is role-adaptive: an administrator, an end user, and a procurement lead are asked different questions, and answers are weighted to the dimensions each role can credibly judge.
• One review per person, per product. You can update it at any time; the current version supersedes earlier ones.
• You have no disqualifying conflict of interest (Section 05).

Reviews are structured. Instead of a single star rating, you answer behaviorally anchored questions across five domains of real-world experience — each anchor describes an observable situation, so two honest reviewers with the same experience land on the same answer.

A conflicted review corrupts a certification score. Some relationships disqualify a review outright; others simply require disclosure.

You may not review a product if you are

• A current employee, contractor, or agency of the partner — or were within the past two years.
• An employee, contractor, or founder of a direct competitor of the partner.
• An investor in, or reseller / affiliate of, the partner with a financial interest in its performance.
• An immediate family member of any of the above, reviewing on their behalf.

You must disclose

• If the partner invited you to review. Partner invitations are permitted only through Smartreview AI's own invitation flow, are labeled as such, and are capped in the weight they can carry.
• Any incentive you received for reviewing. Incentives conditioned on positive sentiment, score, or content are prohibited — a review given under such a condition is void, and the partner's conduct is escalated to our integrity team.

Every review passes automated integrity screening and, where flagged, human adjudication. Moderation is about authenticity and content standards — never about sentiment.

Once submitted, a review cannot be updated, and reviews cannot be deleted on request. This preserves the integrity of the historical record that certification scores are built on.

These guidelines are versioned. Material changes are announced on our website and apply to reviews submitted after the effective date. Questions, disclosures, appeals, and integrity reports:

This Reviewer Guidelines was last updated on August 2026.