In March 2026, the Competition and Markets Authority opened formal investigations into five well known names: Auto Trader, Feefo, Dignity, Just Eat and Pasta Evangelists, over fake and misleading online reviews. The regulator can fine any of them up to 10% of global turnover. For a business the size of Just Eat, that is a number with nine zeros.
It is tempting to read that story and think it is a big-company problem. It is not. The law behind these investigations, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, has no small business exemption. The rules that just triggered a formal CMA investigation into some of Britain's best known brands apply with equal force to the hairdresser on the high street and the plumber with a van.
1. What actually happened in March
The five investigations, the first formal fake reviews cases brought under the DMCC Act, span the funeral, food delivery and automotive sectors. The alleged practices under scrutiny include suppressing negative reviews, offering incentives in exchange for five-star ratings, and asking staff to post positive reviews of their own employer. None of this is exotic. It is the sort of thing thousands of small businesses have done, often without realising it was ever a problem, for years.
2. The rules that changed under your feet
Since April 2025, a set of review practices have been "banned practices" under the DMCC Act, meaning they are automatically unfair regardless of whether anyone intended to deceive. The table below sets out what these look like in practice for an ordinary small business, not a national platform.
| Banned practice | What it looks like for a small business | The exposure |
|---|---|---|
| Fake reviews | Asking a friend, family member or supplier to review a business they have never used | Automatic breach; Trading Standards and CMA enforcement powers apply |
| Concealed incentives | Offering a free coffee or a discount for a review, without disclosing the incentive | Undisclosed incentives are banned outright |
| Selective posting | Publishing only the positive reviews while quietly hiding or deleting negative ones | Counts as misleading presentation, even if reviews shown are genuine |
| Staff-written reviews | An owner or employee posting a review of their own business | Treated identically to any other fake review |
3. Why small businesses are the more exposed group, not the less exposed
Large platforms have compliance teams reading every line of CMA guidance the day it lands. Most small business owners do not, and never will. But the CMA's own guidance is explicit that any trader publishing reviews must take reasonable and proportionate steps to prevent and remove banned reviews on their own channels, not just wait to be told off. Enforcement does not only arrive by CMA letter. It arrives through Trading Standards at a local level, through complaints from disgruntled customers or competitors, and increasingly through platform-side detection systems built to catch exactly the kind of review pattern a well-meaning small business creates when it asks every customer for a review in the same week.
Layer onto that the scale of the wider problem. Fake and AI-generated reviews are estimated to have cost consumers hundreds of billions of pounds globally in the past year alone, and platforms from Google to Amazon have signed undertakings to get tougher on detection. Genuine small businesses now sit inside a system built to hunt for exactly the shortcuts many of them have taken without a second thought.
4. What to check this week
A short, practical audit covers most of the exposure.
- Review any incentive currently offered for a review and either disclose it clearly or drop it.
- Stop asking staff or family to post reviews about the business, full stop.
- Never hide or delete a negative review; respond to it instead, which is both compliant and, the data consistently shows, better for trust than a spotless but implausible five-star page.
- Keep a simple record that reviews are unincentivised and drawn from real, verifiable customers, since that record is the difference between a five-minute conversation with Trading Standards and a formal investigation.
Conclusion
The real story in March was not that Just Eat is in trouble. It is that the rules constraining a food delivery giant apply identically to a business with three staff and no legal budget, and nobody got a phase-in period. The businesses that get this right will not be the ones waiting for a CMA letter to arrive. They will be the ones already treating every review on their page as a small piece of legal exposure, which, since April 2025, it always has been.