How to Stop One Person From Padding Your Feedback Score
A 4.8 average means nothing if six of those ratings came from the same person under six different made-up emails. Here's how email verification keeps a feedback score honest.
By Keepp Team
A feedback score is only worth reading if each rating in it came from a different real person. That’s easy to assume and surprisingly easy to break — nothing stops someone from submitting the same feedback form five times under five made-up emails, whether that’s an unhappy customer inflating a complaint, a friend padding a good review, or just a bored visitor clicking through a public form more than once. The average still shows a number. It’s just not telling you what you think it’s telling you.
Why this is easy to miss
A feedback form with an open email field looks locked down — it’s asking for contact info, so it feels like it’s screening submissions. It isn’t. Typing feedback1@fake.com, feedback2@fake.com, and feedback3@fake.com takes exactly as long as typing one real address, and nothing about a standard form checks whether any of them actually work. The form collected three ratings. It has no way of knowing whether that was three customers or one.
This matters most for anything you’re going to average, not just read individually. A single fake five-star review is annoying but doesn’t move a score much. A person submitting the same low rating six times, or a friend padding an average up before you’ve seen enough real responses to dilute it, changes the number you’re actually making decisions from.
What verification actually fixes
Turning on email verification for a feedback form’s identifying field means a rating doesn’t count toward your average until the person confirms they control the address they typed — either a 6-digit code sent to that address, or a one-click Google sign-in for a single-field form. Six submissions from six made-up addresses becomes, at most, six attempts at verification — and only the ones that actually confirm a real inbox make it into the number you’re reading.
It doesn’t stop someone with six real email addresses from submitting six honest opinions, and it isn’t supposed to — that’s still six real people. What it stops is the version where “six ratings” was actually one person typing quickly.
What happens to the ones that don’t verify
An unverified feedback submission isn’t thrown away — it’s kept in your Data view, labeled as unverified, so you can still see what was written even if you don’t count it toward the average. That matters if a customer starts the verification step, gets distracted, and never finishes it: their feedback is still there, you can still read it and follow up, it’s just clearly marked as not confirmed. Nothing forces an all-or-nothing choice between trusting every submission and trusting none of them.
Setting it up
A feedback-preset form block already has a rating field and an identifying email field by default. Turning on verification is a switch on that email field — nothing else about the form changes, and it’s off by default so you’re only adding the step where it earns something back. Place it right after a purchase or a booking, while the experience is fresh, and turn verification on specifically because a feedback score is exactly the kind of thing where “one person, one entry” needs to actually be true. Collecting leads and feedback from your page covers the rest of the form block if you’re setting one up for the first time.
Common questions
Does this slow down real customers leaving feedback? A little — a code or a Google sign-in click is one extra step. For a score you’re going to average and act on, that’s usually worth it; for casual, low-stakes feedback you can leave verification off.
Can I still see unverified feedback? Yes — it’s kept and labeled, filterable separately in your Data view, so nothing written is lost even when it’s not counted toward the average.
Does this work for feedback that isn’t a numeric rating? Yes — verification applies to the identifying field, not the rating itself, so it works the same way for open-text feedback as it does for a star rating.
Add a verified feedback form to your keepp.link page — free to start. See pricing for the full plan breakdown.