Amazon is limiting the reviews you can read

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Amazon is limiting the reviews you can read

If you wan to buy something on Amazon from a 3rd party seller, you will notice you can’t read many reviews anymore or are limited to

Published on 06 August 2026

Author

Michael Kozlowski

Tags Amazon, Amazon reviews, fake amazon reviews

When buying a new book or any other product on the Amazon website, reading the reviews is a good way to determine if it is good or not. Amazon customer reviews provide product feedback from buyers. You can read feedback, check star ratings, or leave reviews yourself. Sadly, Amazon has just implemented a new policy: readers can only read five 5-star reviews; if you want to read more, you have to wait five business days to read the next batch.

There is no rhyme or reason why some users are seeing this message, while others don’t. On social media, some users have stated that they have purchase history with Amazon and do not subscribe to Amazon Prime. "I was met with a box ‘request to see more reviews, ‘ and when I clicked it got a ‘thank you, please check back in 5 business days." Meanwhile, another user stated, "I have had my account since just after Prime was a thing, so decades now. I have purchased probably easily $100,000 of stuff; it’s not twice that, over the years. My account won’t let me read reviews either."

Amazon Vine is an invite-only program where trusted reviewers get free items to write honest evaluations, and sellers pay fees to receive up to 30 early reviews per product. Users who are a part of this program have also run into the 5-review limit and have to ask for approval to provide more reviews.

Word has it that this has been done to stop sellers from scraping reviews and slapping them on their own product listings. Some pretty unscrupulous sellers out there will do anything to get hundreds of five-star reviews. I think it’s to combat fake reviews from review mills by summarizing 1000 purchased reviews into a single line, making them worthless to sellers. Who gets restricted appears to be random. The wait to be reinstated is to discourage everyone from just opting back in and giving the fake reviews value again. Their market research actually showed that most customers like the summaries, but they left those of us who don’t the choice with a bit of friction.

I think Amazon is trying to gravitate away from reviews that can be bought or stolen. Amazon’s market research found that most people look at the rating and AI summary and don’t read the reviews.

Update: An Amazon spokesperson confirmed that the company is trying to restrict unauthorized data scraping on its site, but it’s also mistakenly flagging legitimate customers as bots, with complaints piling up on Reddit and on Amazon’s forums.

Michael Kozlowski

Editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader | michael@goodereader.com Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

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Amazon is limiting the reviews you can read

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