Before signing up for an electricity tariff, booking a hotel, or deciding on a washing machine, millions of Spaniards do the same thing: they open their mobile and search for reviews. In a country where e-commerce grows every year and Madrid ranks among the regions with the highest online shopping rates, comparison and review websites have become the preliminary filter for almost any purchase. What users rarely ask is who is behind these pages, how they are funded, and why they recommend one product over another.
The doubt is not trivial. An investigation by the European Commission and the Consumer Protection Cooperation (CPC) network reviewed 399 online stores and found that 148 used some pattern designed to push the buyer towards a decision that may not be in their best interest. In terms of reviews, more than half of the websites analysed violated European rules or raised serious doubts about how they avoided fake comments. Knowing how to read a review website has become, for any Spanish buyer, a skill as basic as comparing prices.
Where the Money Comes From for a Comparison Website
Most of these portals do not charge the user. They operate on an affiliate model: when someone clicks on a link and ends up signing up or purchasing, the website receives a commission from the retailer. This is one of the pillars of digital marketing in Spain and a widely used system, from insurance, energy, or mobile tariff comparators, omnipresent in the Spanish market, to blogs that analyse appliances.
The problem arises when that financial incentive contaminates the content. If a website earns more for recommending brand A than brand B, there is a temptation to place brand A at the top even if it is not the best option. It is not illegal to make money by recommending products; what is questionable is not disclosing that the recommendation is paid or allowing the commission to dictate the ranking order.
The difference between a useful comparator and a biased one is almost always in the transparency with which it explains its own business. The more serious pages dedicate a section to clarify where their income comes from and make it clear that the commission does not alter the position of each product in their lists. When that information is nowhere to be found, the consumer is reading an advertisement disguised as advice without knowing it.
The Trust Issue: Fake Reviews and Empty Links
Alongside serious websites, an entire industry of manufactured opinion has grown. There are comment farms that generate ratings en masse, profiles created solely to inflate an average score, and pages that exist only to place links without providing real information. The emergence of generative artificial intelligence has made this fraud cheaper and faster: producing hundreds of plausible reviews now requires neither time nor effort, as various analyses of suspicious opinions on the internet have documented.
The regulatory response came with the Omnibus Directive, transposed in Spain, which requires platforms to indicate whether they verify that the reviewer has genuinely purchased the product and prohibits incentivised reviews that are not identified as such. The European sweep on manipulation practices revealed how much work remains to be done: of the 223 websites reviewed, 176 did not clarify how they handle paid comments. The law exists; compliance is still uneven.
Signs of a Reliable Review Website
You don’t need to be an expert to distinguish an honest portal from one that is only after commissions. The Organisation of Consumers and Users offers a guide on the new rules against fake reviews that summarises what to look for. Here are the most useful clues:
- Verified Purchase. Reviews marked as coming from a real purchase are worth much more than anonymous or unverified ones.
- Transparency about Money. A serious website explains that it earns commissions and clarifies that this does not determine the order of its recommendations.
- Consistency of Profiles. Be wary of accounts with no history, generic names, or that rate disparate products within a few days.
- Visible Editorial Criteria. Knowing who writes, what methodology is used to test products, and when the analysis was updated is a sign of real work behind it.
- Balance in Ratings. A graph with only fives, or shaped like a C (many fives and many ones), often hides manipulation.
The legal framework supports this logic. The Directive (EU) 2019/2161 precisely requires the platform to explain what it does to ensure that reviews come from authentic customers. When a website says nothing about this, it is already providing an answer.
How Transparency Looks in Practice
The theory is simple; the challenge is applying it systematically. Online gaming serves as a good example, as it is one of the areas where the most biased reviews circulate: in Spain, only operators licensed by the Directorate General for Gaming Regulation can offer their services, so a serious comparison must limit itself to regulated sites and explain how it verifies what it publishes. Some industry groups have made this rigor their hallmark: iGaming.com, for example, maintains a comparison that only includes licensed operators and subjects its reviews to verification standards, an approach that allows the reader to understand what is behind each recommendation. This is not a minor detail: working only where a license exists requires maintaining compliance processes, audits, and clear rules on how ratings are developed, in addition to reminding that these services are a form of entertainment for adults and should be used wisely.
This model is recognised in specific signals. A portal that details its methodology, separates editorial content from commercial agreements, and regularly updates its analyses conveys something different from a page that appears out of nowhere with a hundred identical reviews. Users do not have to trust anyone's word, but they can check how much information the website provides about itself. The more transparency, the less room for unpleasant surprises.
Artificial Intelligence Works Both Ways
The same technology that multiplies fake reviews is being used to combat them. Major marketplaces and regulators employ automated systems that detect patterns impossible for a human: hundreds of comments published in minutes, cloned writings, spikes in ratings that coincide with a product launch. AI, which has made fraud cheaper, also allows it to be tracked on a scale that was previously unthinkable.
Authorities have taken note. The European Commission continues to monitor platforms through the CPC network and the Digital Services Act, which requires large websites to account for the content they host. Penalties for violating consumer rules can reach a percentage of the company's annual turnover, a figure designed to make verifying reviews more worthwhile than looking the other way.
The responsibility for ensuring clean opinions increasingly falls on those who publish them, not on the consumer who reads them. Even so, no law replaces the critical eye of the buyer. Tools are improving, regulation is tightening, but the final filter remains the same: the common sense of the person about to hit the buy button.
A Three-Minute Routine Before Trusting
The next time a comparison or review is about to influence your purchase, take a few seconds to scrutinise it. Check if the website explains how it makes money. Look for the verified purchase badge on the reviews. Read two or three negative comments: if there are none or they all sound identical, be suspicious. And check if there is a name, methodology, and date behind the analysis.
Comparison and review websites will continue to be a valuable tool for Spanish consumers to avoid blind purchases. The key is not to stop using them, but to know which ones have earned the right to advise you. In an increasingly digital economy, an opinion is worth as much as the transparency of the person who signs it.
You may also like
