Guidelines · Reviewers

Reviewer Guidelines

Last updated August 2026Sections 8

The standards every review must meet before it can shape a Trust-IQ Score™. Verified experience, honest words, zero pay-to-play — these guidelines explain who may review, what we ask, what we publish, and what we remove.

Version 1.0 · August 2026 · Applies to all reviews on Smartreview AI.

Why These Guidelines Exist

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:

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.
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.
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.

Who these guidelines apply to

Everyone who submits, updates, or comments on a review — whether you arrived organically, were invited by Smartreview AI, or were invited by a partner through Smartreview AI's own invitation flow. Terminology used throughout: organizations listed on Smartreview AI are partners; people who use their software and write reviews are customers.

Who Can Write a Review

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).

Verification before publication

Every review passes identity and usage verification before it is published or counted. Stronger verification earns a review more weight in the score; reviews we cannot verify are not published and carry no weight. We do not disclose the specific signals or thresholds we use — publishing them would be a manual for gaming them.

What You Review

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.

#	Domain	What it covers
01	Use case	Does the product actually do the job you bought it for? Fit for purpose, capability depth, reliability in your workflow.
02	Onboarding	Time to value. Implementation effort, data migration, learning curve, quality of setup guidance.
03	Support	Your lived support experience — responsiveness, competence, escalation, and honesty when things break.
04	Innovation	Does the product keep improving? Release momentum, roadmap follow-through, whether shipped features match promises.
05	Pricing	Commercial truth. Pricing transparency, renewal conduct, whether the value delivered matches the price paid.

Written comments. Free-text comments are optional but valuable — they give buyers the "why" behind your answers. The best comments are specific and factual: what you implemented, what worked, what failed, what you would tell a peer evaluating the product. Comments are moderated against Section 04 before publication.

No star ratings. Smartreview AI does not publish five-star averages anywhere. Your structured answers are aggregated into the Integrity AI pillar of the Trust-IQ Score™ using our published methodology — verification strength, role relevance, recency, and tenure all influence weight. Popularity does not.

Content Standards

Do

Write from first-hand experience — things you did, saw, or measured yourself.
Be specific: versions, timeframes, use cases, team size, what you compared it against.
Be balanced: include what works, not only what doesn't (and vice versa).
Keep it current — and update your review when your experience changes.
State facts you can stand behind; opinions are welcome when clearly framed as your assessment.

Don't

Second-hand, speculative, or fabricated experience — including reviews written for someone else.
Confidential information: contract terms under NDA, security details, unreleased roadmap, internal data.
Personal data about any individual — names of partner staff, contact details, or anything identifying.
Abusive, threatening, discriminatory, or defamatory language; unverifiable accusations of illegality.
Marketing copy, promotional links, referral codes, or AI-generated boilerplate presented as experience.
Off-topic content — review the product, not the company's politics, stock price, or news coverage.

Conflicts of Interest & Disclosure

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.

Undisclosed conflicts are treated as manipulation: the review is removed, related reviews are re-examined, and repeat violations end reviewing privileges.

Integrity, Moderation & What Happens to Your Review

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

Situation	Outcome	Why
Review is negative, critical, or damaging to a partner — but verified and within content standards	Published	Negative sentiment is never a removal reason. Partners cannot pay or petition to remove it.
Verification cannot be completed	Not published	Unverified experience carries no weight in a certification score.
Prohibited content (Section 04) in the written comment	Returned or removed	You will be asked to revise where feasible; otherwise the comment is removed.
Undisclosed conflict, review swap, coordinated or bulk submission, impersonation	Removed	Treated as manipulation; accounts involved are sanctioned.
Partner disputes a review	Factual-error review only	Partners have a right of reply on demonstrable factual errors. A dispute never changes a score by request, and sentiment is not a factual error.

If your review is removed. You will be told which guideline applied (except where doing so would expose our detection methods) and you may appeal once, with evidence, to our integrity team. Appeals are adjudicated by a human, not solely by an automated system.

Updating & Deleting Your Review

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.

Versioning & Contact

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: support@smartreviewai.io.

This Reviewer Guidelines was last updated on August 2026.