Review moderation

Last updated: May 12, 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

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 two view tabs at the top switches between:

  • All reviews — the global queue (default)
  • By product — browse reviews grouped by product. Each 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 table, 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.

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 in a table you can sort and filter. Columns: Rating, Review (title + content snippet), Product (title — falls back to Product (<id>) if the product isn’t synced from Shopify), Media (📎 N when the review has attached photos or videos, em-dash otherwise), Author, Date, Status. The Status column is a holdover from the previous tabs — within a chip every row has the same underlying status, so the column is mostly redundant; we’ll likely drop or repurpose it in a near-future pass.

The Photos filter at the top of the table 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.

Inside the review modal, 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 modal with badges — manual capture, drop in here.

Sort and filter

At the top-right of the review list:

  • Sort — Most Relevant (default), Most Helpful, Newest, Highest Rated, Lowest Rated, Most Detailed, Featured, Most Informative, Critical First, Best Media, Marketing Potential
  • Rating filter — Any rating (default), or a specific star count (5, 4, 3, 2, 1)

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 with sort and rating filter dropdowns open — manual capture, drop in here.

Opening a review

Clicking any row opens a detail modal with the star rating, status 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.

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 row hides when both are absent. See review signals for how the scores are produced.

If the review came from an AI conversation, a Show conversation transcript button appears below the content. Click to expand the full turn-by-turn chat that produced the review. Next to it, an AI draft vs shopper edits 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 modal open over the list — manual capture, drop in here.

From the detail modal you can approve, approve & reply, reply privately, archive, reject, mark as spam, or delete the review — buttons shown match the review’s current status (see approving, rejecting, and other review actions).

Bulk actions

Select multiple reviews using the checkboxes on the left. Selecting at least one row 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

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.