Fakespot is gone. Here’s what to use instead.
Mozilla shut Fakespot down on July 1, 2025, and took its A-to-F review grades with it. A year on, this is the honest state of the replacements, including where our own tool fits and where it doesn’t.
What happened to Fakespot
Fakespot spent nearly a decade grading the trustworthiness of product reviews on Amazon, eBay, and Walmart. Mozilla acquired it in May 2023, built it into Firefox as “Review Checker,” and then announced in May 2025 that it was winding the whole thing down to refocus on the browser. Review Checker went dark on June 10, 2025; the Fakespot extensions, apps, and website followed on July 1. Mozilla’s explanation was blunt: Fakespot “didn’t fit a model we could sustain.”
There was no handoff. Mozilla didn’t sell it, open-source it, or pass the data to anyone. The grades are just gone.
Two ways to fill the hole
Fakespot answered one question: can I trust the reviews under this listing? You can replace that question directly with another review grader. Or you can go one level up.
Fake reviews aren’t evenly distributed across Amazon. They cluster on a specific kind of seller: the disposable pseudo-brand, a random ALL-CAPS trademark with no website, no support line, and no reputation to lose. Filter those sellers out of your search results entirely, and most fake reviews never get the chance to lie to you.
So the real choice is between grading reviews per product and filtering brands across every search. The tools below do one or the other. None of them do both.
The alternatives, honestly
FakeFind: the closest like-for-like replacement
FakeFind is a free review checker: paste an Amazon link (or use its Chrome extension) and it scores review authenticity with a summary of the suspicious patterns it found. It covers Walmart, eBay, Best Buy, and Etsy too, and doesn’t require a login. If what you miss is Fakespot’s grade on a specific product page, this is the pick.
Knockoff: filter the junk before you ever see it
Knockoff (that’s us) doesn’t read reviews at all. It’s a Chrome and Firefox extension that checks every brand in your Amazon search results against a register of 5,500+ established brands, scores unknown names against the linguistic signature of trademark-squat pseudo-brands, and hides, dims, or labels the junk. Your call. The whole appraisal runs locally in your browser: no accounts, no tracking, free and fair-source.
The trade-off cuts both ways. Knockoff won’t warn you about seeded reviews on an established brand’s listing. What it will do is remove the corner of Amazon where fake reviews are the business model. And when the heuristics get a brand wrong, every verdict is one click from being overridden.
ReviewMeta: don’t wait for it
ReviewMeta was the other big name in review analysis, and people still recommend it in old forum threads. It’s been dormant for years and isn’t a practical option in 2026.
The no-extension route
If you’d rather install nothing, the manual checks still work:
- Sort reviews by Most recent and read a full page. Bursts of same-day five-star reviews in broken English are the classic tell.
- Check whether the brand exists outside Amazon: a real website, a support contact, any history at all.
- Treat “Verified Purchase” as a weak signal. Refund-for-review schemes produce verified purchases too.
- Search the brand name plus “reviews” off Amazon and see if anyone has ever heard of it.
It works. It’s just slow, and you have to remember to do it every single time.
Side by side
| Fakespot (2016–2025) | FakeFind | Knockoff | Manual checks | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it judges | Review authenticity | Review authenticity | The brand behind the listing | Whatever you have patience for |
| When it steps in | On the product page | On the product page | In search results, before you click | After you click |
| Where it runs | Gone | Web tool + Chrome | Chrome + Firefox, every Amazon marketplace | Your head |
| Price | — | Free | Free, fair-source | Your time |
Which one should you actually install?
If you’re vetting one specific product before a big purchase, use a review checker like FakeFind. If you’re tired of wading through gibberish brands in every search, use Knockoff. They don’t overlap: one grades listings you’ve already opened, the other decides what deserves to be in your results at all. Run both and you’ve covered both halves of what Fakespot was trying to protect you from.
Frequently asked questions
Why did Mozilla shut down Fakespot?
Mozilla said Fakespot “didn’t fit a model we could sustain” and refocused on Firefox. The shutdown was announced in May 2025 in the same breath as Pocket’s.
Is there an official Fakespot successor?
No. Every replacement is an independent tool built by someone else.
Does Knockoff detect fake reviews?
No, and it doesn’t try to. It filters listings by brand instead. For per-product review analysis, pair it with a review checker.
Is Knockoff really free?
Yes. Free, fair-source (FSL-1.1-MIT), no accounts, no tracking. The code is on GitHub.
Clean up your Amazon results
Knockoff filters the trademark-squat pseudo-brands out of Amazon search, so what’s left is brands with a reputation to lose.