Scout Insights/insights
What the review economy actually looks like, sector by sector
Analysing reviews at scale produces a second thing besides individual reports: a picture of how manipulation is distributed across categories, platforms and time. That picture is worth publishing, and it is worth publishing in a form that can be checked.
What an edition contains
- Manipulation prevalence by category and by platform, and how it moves over time.
- The shape of a sector: what proportion of reviews in a trade show the signature of review gating, how bursts cluster around Black Friday, which product categories carry the highest rate of counterfeit mentions.
- Methodology sufficient for every number to be checked, including the benchmark version and the analysis version that produced it.
What an edition never contains
- Any individual listing, business, reviewer or user.
- Any aggregate drawn from fewer than fifty listings. A cell below that floor is suppressed, not rounded, because rounding a thin cell is a way of publishing it.
- A named business in the sold dataset. A name appears only in the free public commentary, and only where the finding is already public in an individual report.
Who gets it, and for what
- Anybody
- A free public edition, every quarter.
- Market researchers and trade bodies
- The dataset and its API, £2,500 a year.
- Accredited academic researchers
- Free, on request.
- The CMA and Trading Standards
- Free, on request. A regulator working from our data is worth considerably more to us than the licence fee.
Why it is published at all
The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 made fake and undisclosed-incentivised reviews unlawful in the United Kingdom on 6 April 2025, and the CMA has spent the time since demonstrating that it enforces. What nobody has had is a measurement of the problem the Act addresses. Scout Insights is that measurement, and a measurement kept private is a measurement that changes nothing.