Gartner is committed to providing a platform for high-quality reviews and has developed a moderation process in order to achieve that goal. Prior to publishing, all reviews go through a rigorous moderation process in an effort to ensure published reviews are from verified sources, and provide helpful content. As a reminder, all reviews must adhere to the Community Guidelines and all reviews submitted to the site are treated equally during the verification process, regardless of rating or vendor.
You may see within your Review Funnel reporting that reviews are rejected due to ‘Credentials’ - Do not be alarmed! This is an expected result as not every review that is submitted will meet our standards to be published. In general ~30-40% of reviews are rejected that are submitted to Peer Insights.
We have also discovered vendors who are not following best practices by inappropriately sourcing (for example, posting incentivized links on publicly accessible pages), and when this happens, it may draw in networks of bad actors to submit reviews to Peer Insights, which is an unfortunate side effect of publicly available crowdsourcing sites.
We continue to take the stance to protect our platform and your interest to scrutinize all reviews that come to the platform regardless of whether they were sourced organically, by Gartner invitation, or via vendor-invited links. We take moderation extremely seriously, and as such, you may see reviews not accepted when we cannot verify the reviewers identity. Read more below on what ‘credentials’ rejection reasons mean, and next steps required by the reviewer:
Brief Overview of GPI Moderation:
Per the Gartner Peer Insights Review Moderation Guidelines, each review that is submitted on the Gartner Peer Insights web site goes through a rigorous, multi-step moderation and validation process. The purpose of the validation and moderation process is to 1) validate reviewers’ identity, 2) check for potential conflicts of interest, and 3) ensure reviews meet Peer Insights standards for quality.
Overview of ‘Credentials’ Rejection Reason:
When the GPI team validates the reviews’ identity, they independently verify the reviewer’s identity and employment. As part of the process, the team evaluates the reviewer’s name, company, and work email to be consistent based on information provided. In addition, the team also looks for a credible online presence of the reviewer and their company.
When a review is rejected because of credentials, it may mean that there was limited information to authenticate the identity of the reviewer, and likely the reviewer did not complete the required email verification step. Additionally, there may have been inconsistencies in the information provided, or there was no credible online presence to verify their identity, employer, and role.
How Gartner Communicates Rejected Review Status:
When reviews are not approved, the Gartner Peer Insights team will reach out to the reviewer directly via email with why the review was not approved and the steps, if any, they can take to correct their review and resubmit for reevaluation. These details will also appear on the review in the My Reviews section of their profile.
In most cases when reviews are rejected due to Credentials, reviewers will need to validate their email address using the steps sent to them, or they will need to provide additional information regarding their identity, employer and role directly to the Gartner Peer Insights team so that our team can re-evaluate their review. They can do this by replying directly to the email they received, or by reaching out to PeerInsights@gartner.com.
Next Steps to Relay to the Reviewer:
The Gartner Peer Insights team needs to communicate directly with the reviewer on their review rejections.
Given the anonymous nature of the platform, our team will not share with you any specific details on reviews or what is necessary for the reviewers to do to get their reviews published.
If a reviewer comes to you asking why their review was rejected, please do not attempt to help them, and immediately tell them to reach out to the Gartner Peer Insights team at peerinsights@gartner.com directly. Credentialing is a very important part of our moderation and validation process, and it is important that any issues with credentialing are resolved directly with the reviewer.
Best Practices to Keep in Mind:
Please make sure you are only inviting customers to review your product or service who are eligible to submit a review on Gartner Peer Insights. In order to post a review on Peer Insights, the reviewer must meet the requirements outlined in Section 1.4.1 Verifying Reviewers on GPI within Community Guidelines.
Do not post incentivized links in places or forums that are publicly available as bad actors may find the link and compromise it. Read more about this in the blog
Tracking reviews is considered a violation of our Community Guidelines. Peer Insights reserves the right to reject any reviews where we determine the individual reviewer’s identity is known by the vendor.
Your Program Manager will not facilitate an outreach to a reviewer based on suspicions that you have about the status of a review you see in your reporting funnel.
If a reviewer comes to you asking why their review was rejected, please do not attempt to help them, and immediately tell them to reach out to the Gartner Peer Insights team at peerinsights@gartner.com directly.