Looking for a Fakespot alternative?
Fakespot is gone. StarSkew does a narrower version of the same job on Amazon, and this page is honest about which part is missing.
What happened to Fakespot
Mozilla, which acquired Fakespot in 2023, discontinued it. The Review Checker feature built into Firefox was switched off on June 10, 2025, and the Fakespot browser extensions, mobile apps, and website all shut down on July 1, 2025. Mozilla said it was refocusing on Firefox and that Fakespot could not be made into a sustainable business.
Nothing inherited its data or its models, which is why the answer to “what replaced Fakespot?” is unsatisfying: several smaller tools each cover a slice of what it did.
What StarSkew does instead
StarSkew puts a badge next to the star rating on Amazon product pages and scores four patterns in the public rating data — a very high average at scale, an implausible perfect score, a sudden spike in review count, and a star distribution with no unhappy buyers. Every threshold is published on the signals page.
The important difference: StarSkew never reads review text. Fakespot's whole approach was language analysis — spotting copy-paste phrasing, implausible enthusiasm, suspicious reviewer histories. StarSkew works only on the numbers, so it cannot do any of that. What it gains in exchange is that it needs no account, collects no browsing history, and can explain every verdict in one sentence you can check yourself.
If you specifically want review-text analysis, StarSkew is not a replacement and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.
Side by side
| Fakespot | StarSkew | |
|---|---|---|
| Status | Discontinued July 1, 2025 | Active, free |
| What it analyzes | Review text and reviewer behaviour, with machine learning | Rating metadata only: average, review count, star histogram |
| Output | A letter grade (A to F) plus an adjusted rating | A four-state badge and a 0–100 risk score |
| Sites | Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, eBay and others | Amazon only, across 10 marketplaces |
| Account | Optional account; Mozilla account for some features | None, and no way to create one |
| Mobile | iOS and Android apps | Desktop Chrome and Edge only |
If you used Fakespot for its grade
The letter grade was doing two things at once: judging the reviews and telling you whether to buy. StarSkew only does the first, and only partly. Treat a red badge the way you would treat a friend saying “these reviews look odd to me” — a reason to read the one-star reviews and check the dates, not a verdict on the product.
The manual checks Fakespot automated are still worth knowing, and most take under a minute: how to spot fake Amazon reviews yourself.
Free, no account, no ads. Works on 10 Amazon marketplaces.