A Trustpilot review carries a small label that says how it got there. "Verified" means Trustpilot has confirmed that the reviewer had a real experience with the company, usually because the review came through the company's own invitation flow with an order reference. "Invited" means the company asked the customer to write a review, but Trustpilot has not verified the underlying transaction. A review with no label is organic. The reviewer went to Trustpilot on their own and wrote it without an invitation.
Those three groups behave very differently. Invited and verified reviews come from a broad slice of customers, including the many who were satisfied and would never have bothered otherwise. Organic reviews come from people who were motivated enough to seek out the page, and that group skews toward strong opinions, often negative ones. So the same company can look like a five star business in its invited reviews and a two star business in its organic ones. If you only read the overall TrustScore, you miss that split entirely. The rest of this article explains how the labels are assigned, how to read the mix, what a logged out visitor can and cannot see and when you do not need any scraping tool at all.
How Trustpilot assigns the labels
Trustpilot describes the mechanics on its own transparency pages. The page on how reviews work, at https://www.trustpilot.com/trust/how-reviews-work, explains that anyone can write a review of any company, that companies can invite their customers, and that Trustpilot runs automated and manual checks on every review. The reviewer guidelines at https://legal.trustpilot.com/for-reviewers/guidelines-for-reviewers set out who may write a review and what counts as a genuine experience.
The practical result is three paths onto a company profile.
Verified reviews. A company that connects its order system to Trustpilot's invitation service sends an invitation after a purchase. The invitation carries a reference to the transaction. When the customer writes the review through that link, Trustpilot marks it as verified. A reviewer can also earn the verified label later by sending Trustpilot documentation of their experience, such as an order confirmation, when a company challenges the review.
Invited reviews. A company can also invite customers by uploading a list of email addresses or sending manual invitations. These reviews are marked as invited. Trustpilot knows the company asked for the review, but it has no transaction data to confirm the purchase.
Organic reviews. Nobody asked. The reviewer searched for the company, found the profile and wrote. These have no invitation label. On the public page they simply appear without the Verified or Invited tag, and that absence is the signal.
You may also see a "Redirected" tag on some reviews. That means the reviewer clicked through from a link on the company's own website rather than from an email invitation. Trustpilot treats it as a form of invitation.
Why the mix changes the picture
The labels matter because they tell you about selection, not about honesty. A verified review is not more truthful than an organic one. It is just drawn from a different population.
Think of it as two surveys. The invited survey goes to every customer, or at least to every customer the company's system sent an invitation to. Most people who respond had an ordinary, fine experience. The organic survey goes to nobody. It only collects answers from people who cared enough to find the page. Someone whose parcel never arrived cares a lot. Someone whose parcel arrived on Tuesday as promised usually does not.
So when you look at a profile, ask three questions.
What share of reviews is invited or verified? A profile where almost every review is verified means the company has an automated invitation flow and the score mostly reflects the typical customer. A profile where almost every review is organic means the company does not invite, or stopped inviting, and the score reflects the loudest customers.
What does the organic subset say on its own? This is where you find the complaints that the invited stream dilutes. Read the one and two star organic reviews as a group. If they all describe the same failure, that failure is real and recurring, even if the overall score is high.
Did the mix change over time? Trustpilot shows the date of each review. A company that switched on automated invitations will show a sudden rise in verified reviews and a jump in the average. The jump tells you the invitation flow started, not that the service improved. The reverse also happens. A company that stops inviting will drift downward as the organic complaints take over.
Trustpilot's guidelines for companies prohibit selective invitation, meaning a company is not supposed to invite only the customers it expects to be happy. Whether a given company complies is not something you can confirm from the public page. What you can observe is whether the invited and organic groups tell the same story.
What a visitor can see without logging in
The public profile is generous. Without an account you can see each review's star rating, title, body, the date it was written, the date of experience, the reviewer's display name and country, how many reviews that reviewer has written, whether the review is marked Verified or Invited or Redirected, and any reply from the company with its date. You can filter the review list by star rating, by language and by whether reviews are verified. You can sort by most recent or most relevant. You can also see the company's overall TrustScore, the total review count and whether the company has claimed its profile.
What you cannot see is anything behind the label. There is no order reference, no email address, no purchase amount and no indication of which invitation method the company used. You cannot see reviews that Trustpilot removed for breaching its guidelines, and you cannot see reviews that a company flagged and that are temporarily hidden while Trustpilot investigates. Reviews from users who deleted their accounts disappear too. So any count you take today is a snapshot of what survives, not a complete history.
Two other gaps are worth knowing. First, the TrustScore is not a simple average. Trustpilot weights recent reviews more heavily and applies a Bayesian prior, so a company with few reviews is pulled toward a neutral score. Trustpilot explains the calculation in its help center at https://support.trustpilot.com. If you compute a plain average from the reviews you collect, it will not match the displayed score, and that is expected. Second, the public list is paginated at a fixed number of reviews per page. For companies with tens of thousands of reviews, walking every page takes time, and the list can shift under you as new reviews arrive.
Free ways to get the same data
If you are a company looking at your own reviews, you do not need to scrape anything. Trustpilot Business lets you export your own reviews, and the official API documented at https://developers.trustpilot.com gives programmatic access to reviews of your own profile. That is the right choice for your own data. It is complete, it includes fields that never reach the public page, and it does not depend on page structure.
If you are looking at a handful of competitors, or a single supplier you are about to sign with, the public page is enough. Open the profile, filter by verified, note the count and the average, then switch the filter off and read the organic one and two star reviews. For one company this takes ten minutes and costs nothing.
The public API does not cover other companies' reviews in the way a researcher or a due diligence team usually needs. That is the gap where collecting the public pages makes sense. It is the better choice when you need the label on every review across hundreds of profiles, when you want to track how the verified share moves month by month, or when you want to compare the organic sentiment of an entire sector. Manual reading does not scale to that, and the official API is scoped to profiles you own.
Reading the labels like an analyst
A short checklist for any profile you look at.
Separate the verified and invited reviews from the organic ones before you do anything else. Treat them as two datasets.
Compare the average star rating of each group. A gap of a star or more between the groups is normal. A gap of three stars means the organic reviewers are describing a company the invited reviewers do not recognize, and you should read why.
Look at the company's reply rate and reply content. A company that replies to organic complaints with specific actions behaves differently from one that pastes the same sentence under every one star review.
Check the reviewer's review count. A reviewer with one review, one country and a five star rating written on the same day as fifty similar ones is not proof of anything, but a cluster of them is worth a closer look.
Note the date of experience against the date of the review. A long gap on an organic review often means a dispute that went unresolved for weeks before the customer gave up and wrote it.
None of this requires a tool. The tool only matters when you need to do it across many companies or repeatedly over time.
If you want to collect Trustpilot reviews with the Verified, Invited and Redirected labels intact, along with the reply, the dates and the reviewer metadata, across as many company profiles as you need and paid only per review returned, see the Trustpilot reviews scraper on this site.
Want the signal instead of the raw filings? Get a free report preview. Prefer the tool to the write-up? Browse all data feeds or connect the free MCP server.