Fakespot Shut Down — Here’s What to Use Instead (2026)
Fakespot went offline July 1, 2025 (the Firefox Review Checker feature stopped even earlier, on June 10). Mozilla never sold it or open-sourced the grading engine, so the black-box A–F grades are simply gone. The good news: the transparent way to evaluate reviews — check the signals yourself — works better today than it did in 2024, and free tools now do the counting for you.
The direct replacement
Check reviews with rules you can read
The free KnowVault Fake Review Checker does what Fakespot users actually needed: paste an Amazon review page URL plus the reviews, and get a signal checklist — 5-star bursts, repeated wording, generic praise — with the exact computation behind every flag. Runs locally in your browser.
Free · No credit card required
Open the Fake Review Checker →What exactly happened, date by date
| Date | What changed |
|---|---|
| May 22, 2025 | Mozilla publishes the announcement that it is winding down both Pocket and Fakespot to invest in other priorities. |
| June 10, 2025 | The Review Checker feature inside Firefox — the built-in integration powered by Fakespot — is switched off. |
| July 1, 2025 | Fakespot’s website, browser extensions, and mobile apps stop working. No sale, no open-sourcing of the grading engine, no successor service has been announced by Mozilla or the founders since. |
If a 2026 article still recommends “installing the Fakespot extension,” it is out of date — the extension has no live backend to talk to.
What to use instead, by what you were using Fakespot for
If you used the grades to vet a product before buying
The transparent-signal approach covers the same ground with fewer trust assumptions — instead of a grade from a closed model, you get per-signal results you can reproduce by hand:
- Rating-distribution shape: a wall of recent 5★ reviews with almost nothing below is the strongest public red flag — the same pattern Fakespot’s model weighed, visible in one glance at the histogram.
- Wording clusters: repeated praise phrases and identical 5-word chunks across “different” reviewers are the fingerprints paid-review campaigns leave behind.
- Timing bursts: batches of near-identical reviews within days of launch — organic sales trickle, campaigns flood.
The full rule-by-rule walkthrough explains each signal, and the free checker runs all of them on any product page you paste.
If you were a seller using it to monitor your own listings
Two things changed in your favor since Fakespot’s heyday. First, the FTC’s rule on consumer reviews and testimonials (16 CFR Part 465) has been in force since October 21, 2024 — buying, writing, or suppressing reviews now carries per-violation civil penalties in the US, and Amazon keeps suing paid-review brokers (with the BBB in joint suits) while blocking hundreds of millions of suspected-fake reviews a year. Second, for your own products you can export your reviews and analyze them directly — the Review CSV Analyzer reads any marketplace export in your browser, and the Review Summarizer turns a paste of reviews into themes and sentiment for free.
If you just want a number to quote
Nobody honest can hand you a current one — the estimators that produced the famous ranges are gone, and Amazon publishes what it blocks (275M+ suspected fakes in 2024), not what remains. The percentage breakdown page explains why the range is the honest answer.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did Fakespot shut down?
Yes. Mozilla announced the shutdown on May 22, 2025 and turned the service off in stages: the Review Checker feature inside Firefox stopped on June 10, 2025, and the Fakespot website, browser extensions, and mobile apps went offline on July 1, 2025.
Is there a way to still use Fakespot?
No. Mozilla did not sell the service, open-source the grading engine, or name a successor, so there is no supported way to access Fakespot’s analysis anymore. Old extensions simply stop working against their discontinued backend.
What is the best free Fakespot alternative?
For Amazon product pages, use a checker that shows its own rules so you can verify it: the free KnowVault Fake Review Checker runs transparent signals — rating-distribution shape, wording clusters, repeated phrasing, timing bursts — entirely in your browser with no sign-up, and explains the computation behind every signal.
Why did Fakespot shut down?
Mozilla framed it as focusing investment on what moves the internet forward — the same May 2025 announcement also discontinued Pocket. The company did not publish detailed reasons specific to Fakespot, and has not revived or transferred the service since.