Here's the short answer: Fakespot is gone, and it is not coming back. Mozilla, which had owned Fakespot since 2023, announced on May 22, 2025 that it was shutting the service down. The Firefox Review Checker feature that ran on Fakespot's technology went dark first, on June 10, 2025. The browser extensions, the mobile apps, and fakespot.com itself followed on July 1, 2025. Mozilla's entire public explanation fit in one sentence: the product "didn't fit a model we could sustain."
If you landed here mid-shopping-trip and just want the protection back, I built a replacement: SureVett is a free Fakespot alternative that puts an A–F trust grade, with the reasoning shown, back on every Amazon product page. Disclosure up front, as always: I'm biased. If you want the whole field, I also wrote an honest rundown of the best Fakespot alternatives, including six tools that aren't mine.
Now the full story, because the details answer most of the follow-up questions people have.
The Fakespot timeline
2016. Saoud Khalifah founds Fakespot in New York, later joined by co-founder Rob Gross. The pitch is simple and, at the time, novel: paste an Amazon URL (or install the extension) and get a letter grade telling you how trustworthy the reviews are. The company raises about $7 million and becomes the default answer to "are these reviews fake?"
May 2023. Mozilla acquires Fakespot. The framing is optimistic: a mission-driven browser company adopting a consumer-protection tool. Mozilla says Fakespot will keep working across all major browsers.
Late 2023. Mozilla builds Fakespot's technology into Firefox as a native feature called Review Checker. This is the beginning of the strategic bet: fake review detection as a reason to use Firefox, rather than as a standalone product.
May 22, 2025. Mozilla announces it is shutting down Fakespot, in the same breath as Pocket. The explanation is that the product "didn't fit a model we could sustain," and that Mozilla is refocusing on Firefox itself.
June 10, 2025. Review Checker, the Firefox feature, is switched off. The integration that justified the acquisition outlives the announcement by less than three weeks.
July 1, 2025. The Fakespot extensions, the mobile apps, and fakespot.com all go offline. There is no data export, no handoff, no recommended successor. More than 10 million people who relied on it wake up unprotected.
Why did Mozilla shut Fakespot down?
Mozilla never elaborated much beyond the sustainability line, so anything more specific is inference. But the shape of the problem is easy to see from the outside.
Fakespot was expensive to run. Analyzing reviews at scale means continuously fetching and processing data from retailers that actively resist scraping, plus the compute cost of the analysis itself. It was also free, with no meaningful revenue attached: no subscription, no enterprise tier that ever became the story. That combination (high burn, no model) is survivable inside a growth-stage startup with patient investors. It is much harder to justify inside a nonprofit-backed organization cutting costs, which is exactly what Mozilla was doing in 2025. Pocket died in the same announcement.
The lesson I take from it, as someone building in this space: a consumer trust tool has to be cheap enough to run that it can survive on modest revenue, or it will eventually be someone's line item to cut. That's why SureVett's analysis runs locally in your browser instead of on a scraping-and-server pipeline.
Is Fakespot coming back?
No. And this one you don't have to take on faith, because every signal points the same way.
Mozilla didn't sell Fakespot to anyone. It didn't open-source the code. It didn't hand the data or the models to a successor. The domain has now been offline for more than a year, and there has been no revival announcement from Mozilla or from Fakespot's founders. If someone wanted to resurrect the brand at this point, they would effectively be rebuilding the product from scratch and attaching an old name to it.
If you see a tool claiming to be Fakespot, treat that as a red flag in itself.
Does Review Checker still work in Firefox?
No, and this is the detail people get wrong most often, including me: an earlier version of my alternatives guide said Firefox users kept Review Checker. They didn't. Mozilla shut Review Checker down on June 10, 2025, three weeks before the main Fakespot shutdown. Switching to Firefox was never an escape hatch, and there is no fake review detection built into any major browser today.
SureVett brings the A-F trust grade back to Amazon. Free, no signup, and it shows you the reasoning.
Add to Chrome — FreeWhat should former Fakespot users do now?
Three practical steps, in order of effort:
- Install a replacement extension. This is the only option that protects you automatically, on every product page, without you remembering to check. SureVett is mine: free, no account, A–F grades with the six signals behind each score shown. If you want to comparison-shop first (you should), the full alternatives rundown covers every option I could find, with the trade-offs stated plainly.
- Learn the manual tells. Tools miss things, and you won't always be on a supported site. The patterns in how to spot fake Amazon reviews take a few minutes to learn and work anywhere.
- For big purchases, add a manual LLM check. Copy 20 to 30 reviews into ChatGPT or Claude and ask for a manipulation analysis. Slow, but the most thorough single check available right now.