Real products get reviews slowly over time. If you see a product that had zero reviews for months and then suddenly gained 200 five-star ratings in a single weekend, those are almost certainly paid for. Sellers use "Review Farms" to dump feedback all at once to trigger the Amazon algorithm.

Bots and paid reviewers often follow a script. Keep an eye out for phrases that keep appearing in different reviews like "Game changer" or "I was skeptical at first but this is amazing." If multiple people are using the exact same wording, you are looking at a bot campaign rather than a real customer experience.

Customer photos should look like they were taken in a real house with a phone camera. If every "customer image" looks like a high-end studio photograph with perfect lighting and a white background, the seller likely uploaded them through fake accounts to make the product look premium.

Sometimes a bot will glitch. You might see a five-star rating where the text says something completely unrelated like "Great shoes" on a listing for a toaster. This happens when sellers "recycle" an old listing with good reviews to launch a completely different, low-quality product.

Look for small text at the bottom of a review that says "I received this product for free in exchange for an honest opinion." While these are technically allowed, they are rarely unbiased. If the first ten reviews you see all have this disclosure, the product hasn't actually survived the test of a paying customer yet.