A review lives on a platform: a Google Business Profile, Checkatrade, Trustpilot, or wherever the customer actually left it. It sits in an account, carries a date, and can be checked by anyone who wants to look. A screenshot is a picture of that page at one moment. Once you save it and paste it onto your own website, it stops being connected to any of that.

What the picture leaves behind

A screenshot cannot be clicked through to the original. A reader who wants to check it, see the reviewer's other reviews, or confirm the business named matches yours has no way to do that from the image alone. If the review is edited or taken down on the platform afterwards, the screenshot on your site carries on showing the old version with no way for a reader to know.

• No link back to the account that left it
• No way to confirm the date shown is still accurate
• No update if the reviewer changes or removes it
• Text inside an image cannot be searched or read by a screen reader

Where the review still needs to live

Putting a review on your own site as text or an image does not replace it being on the platform. A customer deciding whether to call you is often checking the platform itself, because that is where they expect to be able to verify what they are reading. A screenshot can sit alongside that, but it is not a substitute for it.

What the Competition and Markets Authority expects

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is the body that enforces consumer protection law, including the rules on how businesses present reviews. Under this law, a business cannot post a fake review, cannot pay someone to write a positive one without saying so, and cannot quietly hide the negative reviews so that only the flattering ones are visible. Choosing to show only the reviews that suit the business, while the rest sit unpublished, is treated the same way as writing one from scratch: either way, the reader ends up with a false impression of what customers generally think.

What the Advertising Standards Authority expects

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) regulates the content of adverts, and a review shown on a website to help sell the work counts as advertising for this purpose. A review used this way has to come from someone who genuinely used the service, and it has to be shown in a way that doesn't give visitors a false idea of how customers generally feel. Editing a review to take out a complaint, or rewriting it in different words, moves it outside what the ASA treats as an acceptable use of somebody else's account of the job.

What this means for a review on a trade website

A review that goes on your site should stay as the customer wrote it. If part of it is unflattering, the decision is whether to publish that review at all. Leaving a review off the site is a different matter from changing what it says, and it's the second one that creates a problem under both bodies' rules.

Current guidance from each body sits on gov.uk and on asa.org.uk. Checking there before publishing a set of reviews is the more reliable route, since the rules are the CMA's and the ASA's to set.

A review lives on the platform that collected it: Google, Checkatrade, TrustATrader, Trustpilot, or wherever a customer left it. The platform holds the date, the reviewer's account, and the mechanism that stops the same person leaving five reviews under different names. A website has none of that machinery, so a review copied onto a website loses the thing that made it a review in the first place.

What the website can carry

A website can link to the review platform itself, or quote a review with the reviewer's name and the platform it came from stated alongside it. Both keep the reader able to check the review at its source, which is what makes the quote worth anything. A quote with no source attached is just a sentence someone wrote.

What stays on the platform

Star ratings, review counts, and anything the platform calculates from its own data belong on the platform. A website can say how many reviews a business has and link through to them, but restating a rating on a page the platform did not generate turns a live figure into a static claim that stops updating the moment it is typed.

Why the split matters

Keeping reviews on the platform and job detail on the website means each carries the part it is actually built for. The website is the place for what a job involved and where it was done, with photographs of the work itself set out on the page built for that: see Job Photographs: What to Take and How to Get Them on to the Site. The review platform is the place for what a customer said about it, kept where it can still be checked.