Guides / Drafting
How to Write a Negative Review That Stays Up
The angriest review is almost never the most damaging one. A cold, dated, itemised account outlives the moderation queue, outranks the marketing, and is the first thing the next customer reads.
Anchor every sentence to something you can prove
A date, an amount, an invoice number, a quoted promise. A review made of verifiable facts is the one moderators keep and lawyers leave alone. A review made of adjectives is deleted the first time it is flagged.
Signal opinion as opinion
"In my experience", "I felt", "I would not use them again". Opinion is protected in a way that a bare factual assertion is not — but only if a reader can tell which is which.
Never state a crime as fact
Fraud, theft and scam are legal conclusions. Describe what happened and let the reader draw them: what you paid, what you received, what they said when you asked.
Leave individuals out of it
Name the company, not the employee. Naming staff gets reviews stripped on most platforms and turns a business dispute into a personal one.
Write it once, in your own words, per platform
Identical text pasted across five sites reads as a campaign to every spam filter. The same facts, written fresh each time, does not.
Say what you wanted to happen
"I asked for a refund and got no reply" tells the next customer more about the business than any insult, and it is unarguable.
Gets deleted
"Total scam artists, they stole my money, Dave in the office is a liar. AVOID!!!"
Stays up
"I paid $840 on 14 March for a transmission service quoted at two days. The car came back on 22 March with the same fault, and on my second visit I was told the work had not been done. I asked for a refund on 2 April and have had no reply. In my experience they do not stand behind their work."
Full detail on what platforms accept is in our ground rules, and what to do if a review disappears is in the removals guide.