Reviews Methodology: How We Keep Reviews Trustworthy

Reviews help people choose a mover they can trust, so they need to be real. This page explains who can write a review, how we check reviews, how we use AI, and what we do when something looks wrong.

In Short

• Anyone who hired, booked or paid a deposit to a moving company can review it. You don’t need an account.
• Every review goes through automated checks, including AI, before it’s published, and our moderators decide on the ones our systems flag.
• We never remove a review just because it’s negative.
• No mover can pay to remove, hide or change a review.

Who Can Write a Review

You can review a moving company if you hired it, booked it or paid it a deposit. That includes moves that went wrong or never happened, such as a crew that didn’t show up or a shipment that was held back. Those experiences matter most to other people.

You can’t review a mover if you work for it, own part of it, are a close friend or relative of its owner or staff, work for a competitor, or were offered anything in return for your review. To see the three ways reviews reach us and what the Verified and Invited labels mean, see How do reviews get on My Good Movers?. Full rules: Guidelines for Reviewers.

How We Check Every Review

1. We check the details make sense. You tell us your move date, where you moved from and to, the size of your move and, if you want, what you paid. We check these details are complete and fit together.
2. You confirm your email. We email you a link after you post. Your review isn’t published until you click it.
3. An AI tool checks every review. Before a review is published, our AI review moderator reads it and gives a result: it marks the review as OK, or flags it with a reason. For example, it flags a review that isn’t about a moving company or a moving experience, or that is a list of names and contact details instead of a review. Every flagged review goes to our moderators.
4. We look for signs of fake reviews. Our systems look for patterns such as repeated or copied wording, unusual timing, a sudden burst of very positive or very negative reviews for one mover, many reviews from the same device or network, or reviews posted to many movers at once.
5. We look for conflicts of interest. If we find that a review came from the mover, its staff, its family or a competitor, we remove it.
6. A person makes the final decision. Our moderators decide on every review the AI flags, plus a share of other reviews picked at random. The AI never has the final say, and our moderators can overrule its result. We may ask the reviewer for proof of the move.
7. We publish the review once it passes. We aim to publish reviews within a few days. It can take longer when we need to check a review more closely.

What We Don’t Allow

We remove a review, or the part of it that breaks our rules, if it:

• is fake, bought or rewarded, or comes from someone connected to the mover or a competitor;
• isn’t about a real experience with that mover;
• includes threats, hate speech or obscene language;
• shares private information, such as a phone number, home address or a crew member’s full name;
• is spam or advertising.

We never remove a review just because it’s negative. We apply the same rules to positive and negative reviews. A review that follows our rules stays published, however many times it’s reported.

How Movers Can Reply and Dispute

• Replies. A mover can post one public reply to each review. Replies must be professional and follow our Guidelines for Moving Companies.
• Disputes. If a mover believes a review breaks our guidelines, for example because the reviewer was never its customer, it can dispute the review from its dashboard. Our team checks every dispute and may ask the reviewer for proof of the move. If the review is genuine, it stays published, and the mover can reply publicly.
• No pressure. A mover must never contact you to change or remove a review, offer you something to change it, or hold back your belongings. If that happens, report it.

How to Report a Review

Use the “Report” button on the review, or Report a Concern. A moderator usually checks reports within one to three days. See Action We Take for what happens next and how to appeal.

How Star Ratings Work

A mover’s star rating is based on the published reviews it has received on My Good Movers. Reviews we remove don’t count. Payment of any kind never changes a mover’s star rating.

How reviews feed into the order of movers in our results is explained in How We Rank and Sort Movers.

How We Use AI

We use AI in two places, and people stay in charge of both:

• Checking reviews. An AI tool reads every new review and flags the ones that don’t seem to describe a real moving experience or may break our guidelines. Our moderators decide on every flagged review.
• Review summaries. Some company profiles show a short summary of what customers praise and what they would like improved. It is written by AI from the published reviews and labeled as an AI summary. It never changes the star rating or which reviews we show.

We don’t use AI to write reviews, and we don’t allow reviews written by AI. Moving companies on Premium can use AI to draft a reply to a review; the company checks the draft and is responsible for what it posts.

Ads Don’t Affect Reviews

Some moving companies pay us for subscriptions, ad spots or leads. That never changes which reviews we show, the order they appear in, a mover’s star rating, or whether a review shows a label. Paid spots are labeled “Ad.” See Our Policy on Ads and Unbiased Rankings.

How We Protect Reviewers

We show the name you enter, your move details (cities or states, move size and, if you include it, the cost), your review text and any photos you add. We never show your email address, phone number or any documents you share with us. You can delete your review at any time with the "Delete Review" link in the email we send when it goes live, or by emailing [email protected]. See our Privacy Policy.

Why You Can Trust Our Reviews

• Open to every real customer, happy or not.
• Checked before publishing, by our systems and our moderators.
• Kept separate from money. Paying us never changes reviews or ratings.
• Open about results. We publish our numbers in our Transparency Report.

Related articles

• Guidelines for Reviewers
• Action We Take
• Transparency Report