[alexbrower]

There is an insidious and perhaps even more blatant pay-for-review industry in B2B software: Capterra, G2Crowd, TrustPilot, etc.

They all promise "unbiased reviews" but aggressively offer a company's "confirmed users" a variety of small fiduciary benefits to leave a review (gift card here and there).

Then, they upsell the B2B vendor on the ability to manipulate those reviews; e.g., you pay an extra fee to triage negative reviews by telling customer support "nope, not a confirmed user - please remove."

For whatever reason (probably sheer traffic), these B2B review sites have high domain authority scores. So even where marketing teams agree that paying for reviews is BS — there can arise an incentive to pay for reviews from an SEO perspective.

Realizing that this idea is fraught with challenges for B2B customers and vendors: is there an open source protocol that could anonymously verify that a user is _actually_ a current or former user of a given service?

Chickens and eggs...