1. What this policy applies to
This policy applies whenever AUTAVIQ publishes consumer reviews, star ratings or other review-derived information about an automotive business. It also applies to businesses, customers and staff using AUTAVIQ review tools.
2. AUTAVIQ Verified Review
A review may be labelled AUTAVIQ Verified only where AUTAVIQ can link the reviewer to a genuine completed or materially progressed AUTAVIQ service/job/transaction with the business being reviewed. A business cannot buy this label and cannot award it to its own reviews.
Verification confirms the relationship/transaction evidence available to AUTAVIQ. It does not mean AUTAVIQ independently proves every opinion or factual statement in the review.
3. Other review sources
If AUTAVIQ later displays customer reviews that were not generated from a verified AUTAVIQ job, or imports reviews from an external source, the source must be made clear and must not be presented as AUTAVIQ Verified.
4. Fake and misleading reviews are prohibited
You must not submit, commission, arrange or encourage:
- a review that is not based on a genuine experience;
- a review written by the business, its staff or an agent pretending to be a customer;
- multiple reviews intended to manipulate the overall rating;
- a review that materially misrepresents the reviewer's relationship with the business;
- an undisclosed review that was commissioned, rewarded or incentivised;
- a review targeting a competitor when the reviewer had no genuine customer experience.
5. Incentivised reviews
AUTAVIQ does not permit incentives that are conditional on a positive rating or favourable content. If AUTAVIQ ever permits an incentive for submitting an honest review regardless of sentiment, the incentive must be disclosed clearly with the review and the review must still reflect the reviewer's genuine experience.
6. Negative reviews
A genuine negative review is not removed merely because a business dislikes it, disputes the opinion or offers the customer a remedy. Businesses must not make complaint resolution, refunds or service recovery conditional on a customer removing or changing a genuine review.
7. Content that may be moderated or removed
AUTAVIQ may restrict or remove review content where it:
- is fake, manipulated or materially misleading;
- contains threats, harassment, hate, unlawful content or personal data that should not be public;
- contains spam, malware, advertising or content unrelated to the customer experience;
- infringes another person's rights;
- relates to the wrong business or transaction;
- breaches a legal requirement or valid court/regulatory instruction.
Where practical, moderation should address the problematic content rather than suppress a genuine review simply because part of it requires correction.
8. How reviews are checked
AUTAVIQ may use job/booking identifiers, account history, transaction/service records, duplicate-pattern checks, abuse signals and manual review to assess whether a review is genuine. The level of checking may vary with the risk and review source.
9. Business responses and disputes
Businesses may be given a right to respond to a published review and to report a review for investigation. Reporting a review does not automatically remove it. AUTAVIQ will assess the report against this policy and available evidence, applying the same standard to positive and negative reviews.
10. Ratings and presentation
Aggregate ratings must be calculated from the reviews that qualify for the relevant published score and must not be secretly adjusted because a business pays more. Sponsored placement, if ever introduced, must be labelled separately from review/trust scoring.
11. Reference/demo content
Illustrative product demonstrations must not be presented to the public as genuine customer reviews. Reference/demo copy must be labelled as illustrative or kept out of the live review feed until it is replaced by real review data.
12. Reporting a concern
Review concerns can be raised through the applicable in-product reporting route. A public support contact will be added to the Support page before the first external pilot is activated.