Disclosure: we run a competing trade directory, so treat this page with the scepticism that deserves. Everything below is either MyBuilder's own published policy or a matter of public record, and the law described applies to us in exactly the same terms.
What MyBuilder's gating requires
Under its published reviews policy, a review can generally only be submitted where all of the following are true:
1. The review is linked to a job posted on the platform by a registered homeowner 2. The tradesperson was hired for that job through the platform 3. The homeowner is logged into their account when posting
Work must also have started, or a deposit been paid, before a review can be left.
That is real structural gating, not a promise to moderate carefully. Every review has to sit on top of an actual transaction that the platform can see.
What that prevents
A tradesperson cannot write reviews for themselves. They cannot ask friends and family who were never customers to post. They cannot import glowing testimonials collected off-platform and present them as platform reviews. They cannot have a happy customer who found them by word of mouth post a review, because that job never went through the system.
Those are the easy attacks, and they are the ones that make open review boxes so unreliable. Gating removes all of them at once, which is why this is a stronger design than an open form.
What it cannot prevent
The gating verifies that a transaction happened. It does not verify that the two parties to it were independent of each other.
In principle someone could create a homeowner account, post a job, hire themselves through the platform, pay the lead fee and leave a review. The cost of that attack is the fee plus the effort of maintaining plausible accounts, which is a real deterrent, since an open review box costs nothing to abuse. It is a deterrent rather than a wall.
The honest summary is that MyBuilder's gating raises the price of faking a review from nothing to something, and that is a meaningful difference without being a guarantee.
The law changed on 6 April 2025
This is the part most pages on the subject miss, and it matters more than any platform's policy.
The consumer provisions of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 came into force on 6 April 2025, and fake reviews were added to the list of commercial practices considered unfair in all circumstances. That means banned outright, with no need to prove consumer detriment.
The banned practices include submitting, commissioning or offering fake or misleading reviews; publishing reviews not based on genuine experience while presenting them as though they were; publishing reviews in a misleading way, such as cherry-picking positives or using outdated feedback; concealing negative reviews; featuring paid-for or incentivised reviews without marking them clearly; and presenting misleading star ratings or aggregated feedback.
One of them deserves separate emphasis: operating a review system without taking reasonable steps to prevent and remove fake reviews is itself the offence. That is an affirmative duty on the platform, not merely a prohibition on faking reviews itself. Every UK review platform is caught by it: MyBuilder, every other directory, and us.
What the CMA can now do
From the same date the Competition and Markets Authority can investigate and enforce consumer law directly, without going to court first. It can impose fines of up to 10% of global turnover.
That is a structural change in enforcement, not a tightening of an existing power, and it is why platform review policies have been rewritten across the sector since 2025.
No trade directory has faced CMA action
This has to be said, because discussing the fake-review crackdown next to a named platform without saying it would imply something untrue.
The CMA opened its first five consumer law investigations into fake and misleading reviews on 27 March 2026. The businesses named were Autotrader, Feefo, Dignity, Just Eat and Pasta Evangelists. The alleged practices under investigation range from suppression of negative reviews to offering incentives for five-star reviews to asking staff to write fake positive ones.
No trade directory is among them. MyBuilder has not been the subject of CMA enforcement action, and neither has any comparable platform in this sector.
Nobody has audited any of this independently
There is no academic study and no systematic independent audit of review integrity across UK trade directories. What each platform says about its own controls is, in almost every case, the only evidence there is.
That applies to us as much as to anyone else, and it is the reason to treat every claim in this area, ours included, as a description of a stated policy rather than a measured outcome.
How to read reviews on any platform
Read the middling ones rather than the extremes; three-star reviews carry more information than five-star or one-star. Look for specifics: an address, a job type, a problem and how it was handled. Check whether the reviews cluster in time, which can indicate a push rather than a pattern. And weigh a reference you can telephone or an address you can visit above any number of reviews on any site.
Structural gating helps, and it does not replace your own checks.