Review moderation

Last updated: June 18, 2026

Every review a customer submits lands in your moderation queue. The auto-moderation preset can publish some of them automatically — everything else waits for you to decide. This page walks through the Reviews tab and the workflow around it.

The Reviews tab (at /reviews) is the moderation queue and remains in the main nav. The Discovery surface at / is the marketing-team daily workflow — separate from moderation.

The Reviews tab

Screenshot of the Reviews tab in the BetterReviews admin — manual capture, drop in here.

You’ll find it in the main navigation of your BetterReviews admin. The top of the page shows:

Your total review count (across all statuses)
Your average rating across approved reviews only — so your displayed rating never moves because of pending or rejected submissions

A row of view tabs at the top switches between:

All reviews — the global queue (default)
By product — browse reviews grouped by product. Each product row shows product image, title, average rating, total review count, and how many reviews are pending / approved / rejected. Sort by Needs attention (default — pending desc, then most-recent), Most reviews, Highest rated, Lowest rated, Most recent review, or Title A–Z. Filters: search by name, has pending, has photos / video, hide products with no reviews (default on). Tapping a product opens its dedicated reviews page — the same review cards, scoped to that product. Screenshot of the By product tab — manual capture, drop in here. Screenshot of the per-product reviews page — manual capture, drop in here.

(Looking for how your review-request emails are performing? That moved to Collect → Emails → Review request → Performance — see Email performance.)

Inside All reviews, seven stage chips filter the queue by the workflow stage of each review. The default chip is Inbox — the reviews that need a human to look at them now. Other chips:

Inbox — pending reviews where the AI has finished analyzing and flagged a human is needed. Includes spam-flagged reviews; if there are any, the chip badge shows a small sub-count like “Inbox 8 · 1 spam” so you know at a glance if junk is in there.
Emailed to CS — pending reviews emailed to your CS reps for moderation via email-driven moderation. They’re working it from their inbox; you can still click in if you want to. (The customer isn’t contacted at this stage — this is your internal team handling it.)
Support — parent chip for the support-routing cascade (reviews the AI tagged as a support ticket — refund request, broken item, complaint). Count is the total across the cascade’s four sub-stages (Awaiting CS response → On hold → Stale). Click in to see the substate breakdown as section headers.
Stale — a subset of Support. These are support-routed reviews where the email cascade ran its full course (3 nudges over 9 days, or the +5 day extension cap was reached) without your CS team clicking. Visible as a standalone chip so digest-disabled stores never miss the stalled pile.
Published — approved reviews that are live on your widget.
Archived — reviews you’ve intentionally hidden from the storefront. Restorable; never deleted.
Rejected — reviews you’ve explicitly rejected. Kept for record-keeping; never publish.

The chip selection is per-page-load (not a saved preference) — Inbox is always where you land. Reviews still being analyzed by the AI (transient, usually under a minute) are intentionally not represented as a chip; they’d just skew your counts.

Each chip shows reviews as a list of review cards. Each card surfaces the star rating, the review title and a content snippet, the product title (falls back to Product (<id>) if the product isn’t synced from Shopify), a photo/video thumbnail strip when the review has attached media, the author, the date, and the marketing-clearance (Rights) badge — Cleared to use / Permission requested (cards with no request show no badge) — see requesting permission to feature reviews. A checkbox on each card selects it for bulk actions.

The Photos filter in the filter bar lets you narrow to Marketing-ready reviews — reviews with at least one customer photo BetterReviews has flagged as marketing-grade (good quality, product clearly visible, well-lit, on-brand). The flag comes from automatic vision analysis on photos collected through the BetterReviews AI chat. Analysis runs in the background and typically lands within ~1–2 minutes of upload, so a freshly-submitted review may briefly appear without badges before they populate. Imported reviews from Loox, Judge.me, or Okendo aren’t analyzed and won’t appear under this filter. A flagged photo carries a green Marketing ready badge directly on the card’s thumbnail.

On the review detail page, photos that the AI flagged carry a Marketing ready badge in green; photos with quality issues carry a yellow badge with the top issue (“Too dark”, “Blurry”, “Product not visible”). Hover any photo to see the AI’s description of what’s in it. Screenshot of the detail page with badges — manual capture, drop in here.

Search, sort, and filter

A filter bar sits above the review cards:

Search reviews — a free-text box (placeholder “Search reviews, products, or topics”) that matches against review title, content, reviewer name, tagged keywords, and the product title. It does not search customer email.
Date — narrow to a date range.
Rating — Any rating (default), or a specific star count (5, 4, 3, 2, 1).
Photos — narrow to reviews with photos / video, or to Marketing-ready photos.
Flagged for support — show only reviews the AI tagged as a support ticket.

Sort lives at the top-right of the list — Most Relevant (default), Most Helpful, Newest, Highest Rated, Lowest Rated, Most Detailed, Featured, Most Informative, Critical First, Best Media, Marketing Potential.

These work within the current chip. Inbox filtered to 1-star reviews shows only 1-star reviews currently waiting on you.

Screenshot of the Reviews tab filter bar with the search box and filters — manual capture, drop in here.

Opening a review

Clicking a card opens the review detail page (a full page at /reviews/<id>, not a popup) with the star rating, status badge, rights-clearance badge, title, body, attached photos, reviewer name, redacted email, verification badge, platform, product, and submit date. If the review came from an AI conversation, an “AI Conversation” badge is shown. Use the back action at the top of the page to return to the list.

Below the content, a Signals row surfaces our AI analysis of the review:

Sentiment — positive, neutral, negative, or mixed. Tone-coloured so you can scan at a glance (green = positive, red = negative, yellow = mixed).
Quality score — Quality: N/10, from 1 (low-signal) to 10 (marketing-grade). Green when ≥7, red when under 4, plain otherwise.

Reviews imported from a platform (Okendo, Judge.me, Yotpo, Loox) or CSV don’t always have signals yet — the Signals section hides when both are absent. See review signals for how the scores are produced.

If the review came from an AI conversation, a collapsible Conversation transcript section appears below the content. Expand it for the full turn-by-turn chat that produced the review. An Edits before submit section highlights which words the shopper kept, added, or removed from the AI’s pre-edit draft. See viewing the conversation transcript for both sections — what they show and how PII is handled.

Screenshot of the review detail page — manual capture, drop in here.

From the detail page you can approve, reply (in the Your reply section), reject, or delete the review — the actions shown match the review’s current status (see approving, rejecting, and other review actions). You can also click Request permission to feature to ask the reviewer for permission to use their words or photos in marketing (see requesting permission to feature reviews).

Bulk actions

Select multiple reviews using the checkbox on each card. Selecting at least one card reveals bulk action buttons in the list header: Approve, Reject, Delete.

Bulk actions are great for:

Approving the older reviews that stayed pending under your previous workflow (note: when you first switch off Manual, BetterReviews retroactively scores your existing BR-collected backlog against the new threshold — bulk-approve is only needed for the older pre-scoring-rules cohort that the system surfaces for manual review)
Approving a batch of 5-star reviews that all look solid
Rejecting or deleting a batch of obvious spam

Bulk delete asks for confirmation since it’s irreversible. Bulk approve and reject don’t — you can always flip status back later.

Auto-moderation

Before cutover, your moderation queue may be empty or thin — collection is off in evaluation mode, so no new reviews are flowing yet. After cutover, expect your queue to start filling as customers submit. Pick a preset before cutover so the queue auto-thins from day one.

Auto-moderation is off by default (Manual preset). When you’re ready, choose a preset in Collect → Auto-moderation: Open, Relaxed, Balanced, or Careful. Each preset sets a scoring threshold — reviews that score above it publish automatically, reviews below it land in your pending queue. Spam, abuse, and complaint reviews always require manual review regardless of preset.

See what happens after your customer submits for a description of each preset and what it publishes.

Reviews in the Inbox chip are the ones that didn’t meet the threshold (or that you’re still on Manual). Reviews routed to your CS team via email-driven moderation move to the Emailed to CS chip while they work it.

How many reviews should be in your Inbox?

If you’ve chosen a preset like Balanced or Careful, your Inbox should stay small — usually a handful at a time, mostly lower-scoring reviews or ones that triggered a spam or complaint flag. Check it daily or every few days.

If your Inbox is growing faster than you can work through it, switch to a less restrictive preset (for example, from Careful to Balanced or Relaxed), or turn on email-driven moderation so the work fans out to your CS team’s inbox.