Help Centre

Review replies, invitations, awards and fake-review protection

Let sellers answer reviews and invite customers to review, rate by criteria, add photos, show a rating badge and yearly awards, hold suspicious reviews and add an AI summary.

Once reviews are on, the Reviews add-on page has nine more switches. They help sellers collect more reviews and answer them, give visitors more detail than a star average, and keep reviews honest. They suit a business directory especially well, where reviews are what visitors come for, but they work on any site.

Each one is off until you switch it on, and they all need the Nova theme.

Switch them on

  1. Click Add-ons in the sidebar and open Reviews.
  2. Make sure Enable reviews is on.
  3. Switch on the extras you want (see below). For Ratings by criteria, also fill in your criteria.
  4. Click Save changes in the bar at the bottom.

If a switch is greyed out with Set by Yclas support for your site., our team has set it for you: ask us through Support to change it.

Switch What it does
Owners reply to reviews The seller answers each review once, under it.
Ratings by criteria Reviewers rate each of your criteria (for example Quality, Service, Value).
Photos in reviews Reviewers add up to 4 pictures to their review.
Review invitations Sellers email customers a personal review link, or print a QR poster.
Rating badge for sellers’ websites Sellers copy a small badge with their stars to their own website.
Yearly “Best of” awards The best-rated listings of each top category get an award every year.
Fake-review protection Reviews that look bought or self-written wait for your team.
AI review summary A short “What people say” summary on listings with 5 or more reviews.
Ask AI about a listing Visitors ask a question and AI answers from the listing and its reviews.

Owners reply to reviews

With replies on, the seller of a listing sees Reply to this review under each review of it, on the listing’s reviews page. They write up to 1,000 characters and click Post reply. The reply shows under the review as Reply from the seller, and the reviewer gets an email the first time.

The seller can Edit your reply or Remove reply later; an edited reply is marked edited. Your team can remove any reply. Each review gets one reply. A seller’s rating of a buyer has no listing, so it can’t be replied to.

A polite, factual reply to a bad review does more for a business than the review itself does harm. Encourage sellers to thank reviewers and answer their points.

Ratings by criteria

Instead of one star rating, reviewers rate each criterion you list, for example Quality, Service and Value, from one to five stars. The review’s overall rating is the average of its criteria, rounded. The listing’s reviews page shows the average for each criterion as a bar.

When you switch it on, open Criteria below the switch:

  • For every category: up to 5 criteria, separated by commas, for example Quality, Service, Value.
  • Your top categories: a category with its own list uses it instead, and so do its subcategories. A restaurant category might use Food, Service, Atmosphere, a trades category Quality, Punctuality, Price.

Leave a category empty to use the list for every category. Each name can be up to 40 characters.

Photos in reviews

Reviewers can add up to 4 pictures to their review. The pictures follow the same rules as listing photos (formats and size from Image settings). They show under the review, and the newest ones appear in a strip at the top of the listing’s reviews. Deleting a review deletes its pictures too.

Review invitations

Many of a business’s customers never buy through your site: they visit the shop, call the plumber or eat at the restaurant. Invitations let the seller ask them for a review anyway.

On their own listing’s reviews page, the seller clicks Ask for reviews. The page has two ways to ask:

  • Invite by email: they paste the customers’ Email addresses (one per line or separated by commas), add A note from you (optional) and click Send invitations. Each person gets a personal link that works once, for 60 days. The page shows how many were sent and how many reviewed.
  • Print a QR poster: Open the poster gives a printable page with a QR code for the counter, a receipt or a business card. Scanning it opens the review form.

Someone who arrives from an invitation can review the listing without having bought it on your site: Only buyers can review and double-blind reviews don’t apply to them. The other rules do: they must sign in, can review each listing once, and can’t review their own.

So that your site’s email isn’t used for spam, invitations have limits:

Limit Detail
Per seller 50 email invitations a day. The page shows how many are left today.
Per site 500 email invitations a day across all sellers.
Per address Not asked again about the same listing for 30 days, and at most 3 invitations a week from anyone.
New accounts Sellers whose account is less than 2 days old can’t send invitations.

Only the seller of a published listing can invite.

Rating badge for sellers’ websites

A seller whose listing has at least one review sees Show your rating on your website on its reviews page. It shows a small badge with the listing’s stars, its number of reviews and your site’s name, and the code to copy into their own website. The badge links back to the listing’s reviews and updates itself (within an hour) as new reviews come in.

Every badge on a business’s website is a link to your site, which helps it get found.

Yearly “Best of” awards

Once a year, the best-rated listings of each top category get a Best of award, for example Best of Your Site 2026. To win, a listing needs, from the reviews published that year:

  • at least 5 reviews;
  • an average of 4.5 stars or more;
  • a place among the top 10% of its top category (at least one listing per category wins).

The ranking weighs the number of reviews, so a listing with two five-star reviews doesn’t beat one with forty.

Awards for a year are picked on 1 January. Winners get an email, and the award shows on the listing, on its reviews page and on its rating badge. Under the switch, the Reviews page shows how many listings have an award for this year, and Pick the 2026 awards now picks them from the year so far, for example to announce them early. Picking again replaces that year’s awards.

Fake-review protection

Every new review is checked for signs that it was bought or written by the seller:

  • the same network reviewed another of the seller’s listings from a different account in the last 90 days;
  • the reviewer wrote reviews for 3 or more listings in one day;
  • the reviewer’s account is less than a day old;
  • the listing got 5 or more reviews in one day;
  • the review came from the seller’s own network.

A review that looks suspicious enough waits in Reviews to check instead of being published. The rating itself is never a reason: a negative review is never held for being negative.

The Reviews to check link is under the switch on the Reviews page, with the number waiting, and on your dashboard under Needs your attention. For each review:

  • Publish if it is genuine;
  • Keep as not recommended: the review stays visible, collapsed at the bottom of the listing’s reviews under other reviews are not currently recommended, and it doesn’t count in the rating.

The same page has Consumer alerts: a public warning on a listing caught buying or faking reviews. Enter the Listing number and the Alert text, and click Add alert. It shows on the listing and its reviews until you Remove it.

AI review summary

Listings with 5 or more reviews get a What people say summary: two or three sentences with the pros and cons reviewers mention, labelled as an AI summary. It is written in the background, never while a visitor waits, and written again after 3 more reviews come in. It shows on the listing’s reviews page and on the listing.

Ask AI about a listing

Visitors get an Ask about this listing box on the listing page, for questions such as Is there parking? or Do they take cards?. AI answers from the listing (title, description, price, location and its visible fields) and its newest reviews only. When they don’t say, it says so and suggests asking the seller. Answers are labelled as AI answers.

Each visitor can ask 10 questions an hour and 30 a day. The same question on the same listing gets the same answer for a day, until the listing or its reviews change.

The AI review summary and Ask AI are included in paid plans. On a trial or free site the switch keeps its place until you choose a plan.

Updated 22 October 2026 · Suggest an edit