Online review culture has become so entrenched in everyday decision-making that many Americans now treat choosing a pizza place with the same rigour they once reserved for buying a car, and a growing body of evidence suggests the habit is making them worse off, not better.
James Hardaway, a 38-year-old manufacturing manager in Texas, checks Wirecutter, Consumer Reports, Reddit, and YouTube before almost any significant purchase. He and his wife spent $450 on a stroller widely praised online, then replaced it within months. Their reviews-driven dishwasher and mattress leave him similarly unmoved. ‘There are more and more things that are getting reviewed,’ he says. ‘Maybe I don’t need the best plunger, but something in my brain thinks that I do.’
Online Review Culture and the Illusion of the Perfect Choice
The numbers tell the story of how far the habit has spread. A 2016 Pew Research Center survey found that 82% of Americans consult online ratings and reviews before buying something for the first time, with 40% saying they nearly always do so. A separate finding from the same research shows that 54% of review readers pay closer attention to extremely negative assessments than positive ones, while only 43% prioritise the glowing end of the spectrum.
Trust, meanwhile, is far from settled. The Pew online reviews survey found that 51% of review readers believe ratings generally paint an accurate picture of a product or business, while 48% say it is often hard to tell whether reviews are truthful and unbiased. In other words, nearly half the people consulting reviews are simultaneously unsure whether to believe them.
Barry Schwartz, professor emeritus in social theory and social action at Swarthmore College and author of The Paradox of Choice, puts it bluntly. ‘Once you’re out for the best, the path to misery is pretty straight,’ he says. ‘It’s the price we pay for getting what we said we wanted, which we shouldn’t have wanted, which is unlimited options.’
The environment online reinforces the instinct. Google surfaces star ratings before websites, Amazon leads with reviews before listing a price, and AI search engines now summarise the online consensus before users see a link. Michael Luca, a professor at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, frames the core tension: ‘One can get overly indexed on trying to find the best of something. When do we need to be optimising? When do we need to be satisficing?’
Generation Z, AI Summaries, and the Limits of Algorithmic Shortcuts
A Yelp survey conducted with Angus Reid Group, which ran from 2 February to 19 February 2026 and covered 1,323 unweighted respondents aged 18 to 29 across urban and suburban areas of the United States, found that the vast majority of Gen Z consumers research at least one platform before picking a restaurant, gym, or salon. When selecting a new restaurant, 89% cited the menu as influential, 87% cited price, and 73% cited ambiance, according to the Yelp official blog. The same survey found that 78% spent money on takeout or delivery and 72% dined out in person in the month before the survey, with 45% increasing their spending in each category compared with a year earlier.
Yet the same cohort is notably sceptical of AI-generated shortcuts within online review culture. Only 43% of Gen Z respondents said they trust AI summaries for restaurants, and 48% trust them for service professionals.
That scepticism has a basis. AI summaries can flatten nuanced commentary into generic verdicts, overweight a handful of negative comments in the name of balance, or simply get details wrong. Doug Straton, chief marketing officer at Bazaarvoice, which helps brands collect and display ratings, notes that when AI platforms crawl for reviews they focus on volume, recency, and average rating. ‘Because you’re superficially scraping the sites, you don’t have this depth of data,’ he says. Luca adds that AI can help when it tailors information to individual preferences, but a one-size-fits-all summary may not bring a person closer to what they actually want.
Fake reviews compound the problem. Kay Dean, a former federal criminal investigator and founder of Fake Review Watch, describes the problem as ‘massive’ and says platforms have not been aggressive enough in addressing it. ‘They sweep it under the carpet,’ she says. ‘There is a robust black market, openly and flagrantly.’ Businesses trade reviews, recruit them through Facebook groups, or use review brokers, she says.
The Federal Trade Commission moved to address this directly. Its Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials was published in the Federal Register on 22 August 2024 and took effect on 21 October 2024, following a rulemaking process that began with an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in November 2022, according to the Federal Register. The rule, which received unanimous support from all five FTC commissioners, bans false ratings and incentivised testimonials, and also requires company insiders, including officers, managers, and employees, to clearly disclose their connection to a business when posting reviews, according to Holland & Knight. Dean’s concern is that online platforms still escape liability under federal law for content posted by third parties.
Sheena Iyengar, a professor at Columbia Business School who studies choice and innovation, argues the fix starts before the search begins. Clarity on what you actually want, a decent espresso martini at a quiet venue rather than the abstract ‘best bar’, produces better outcomes than chasing a ranking. ‘You make a lot of choices, and most of them are irrelevant and unmemorable,’ she says. ‘Most of your choices in life, because of information overload, you probably should make them on autopilot, save your cognitive energy for the choices that matter.’
Hardaway still checks reviews. But he has accepted that no amount of research guarantees satisfaction, and that the internet’s consensus pick is not always the right one for his life. Sometimes the best stroller is simply the one you end up using. The next test of that philosophy: whether he can stop at the first decent option rather than scrolling towards a perfect one that does not exist.