Our obsession with online recommendations is ruining our vacations, homes, and nights out
James Hardaway has a reputation among his friends and family for being a reviews guy. Before making a big purchase, he'll check Wirecutter and Consumer Reports, do a quick scan of Reddit, and see what's being said on YouTube. He's an avid film fan, and he eagerly combs through Rotten Tomatoes scores and media writeups ahead of new releases to make sure he's in tune with the cultural moment. He feels that if he's not doing his homework, he may not be making the most of his money.
Still, Hardaway, a 38-year-old manufacturing manager in Texas, isn't sure if all the ratings-related rigamarole is meaningfully improving his life. He and his wife spent $450 on the supposed "best" stroller when their first child was born and swapped it out for cheaper options in a matter of months. Their reviews-driven dishwasher and mattress didn’t live up to their expectations, though he does like the internet-approved noise machine. For the most part, all the choices and all the noise leave him constantly wondering whether he could have done better. "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."
Many Americans treat every product, service, and experience they buy like a research project. Eight in 10 Americans read online reviews before buying something for the first time, and more recent industry surveys suggest this norm has only become more entrenched. Case in point: a 2026 Yelp questionnaire found that an overwhelming majority of Gen Z consumers do research on at least one platform before picking a restaurant, gym, or beauty salon.
Reviews are a remarkably useful invention that let us tap into the wisdom of the crowd. However, we may be taking review culture too far. We're drowning in endless options and endless opinions about those options. It leaves us frustrated and less satisfied with our selections and strips spontaneity even from simple picks. Instead of helping us make good decisions quickly, reviews tempt us to believe there's some perfect decision to be found if we just keep scrolling. "Once you're out for the best, the path to misery is pretty straight. It's counterproductive, and it’s the price we pay for getting what we said we wanted — which we shouldn't have wanted —which is unlimited options."
Reviews have made information accessible. Instead of relying on brand marketing or a newspaper critic (a dying breed anyway), people can learn from the experience of hundreds of other customers. But the volume of it all makes it easy to get overwhelmed. It's a familiar experience: You decide to have, say, pizza for dinner and start browsing through the local options. After 30 minutes, you've identified 15 possible restaurants and read dozens of reviews, and you are still no closer to a decision. One pizza is probably better than the other, but also, any pizza is probably fine, and here you are spending most of your Tuesday night on an unexpected, illogical quest to identify the ideal pie.
"One can get overly fixated on trying to find the best of something or all the information that they could find to make that perfect decision about it. When do we need to be optimizing? And just finding something that works for what we're looking to do?" The internet reinforces the instinct. Google surfaces stars before websites, Amazon displays reviews before a price, and AI search engines increasingly summarize the online consensus before users see a link. Small businesses live and die by the algorithms and online rating systems.
Having such an abundance of options can lead to anxiety and decision paralysis. Take the earlier dinner example: You may feel so inundated or discouraged that you forgo the pizza entirely and head to the kitchen to make a sandwich. Moreover, tastes vary, and we often don't know much, if anything, about the people whose perspectives we're using for guidance.
"You're flipping coins because you don't know the source of any of these reviews, but somehow it gives your decision a certain authority that otherwise it wouldn't have." The fact that our consumer choices are so intertwined with our identities gives each decision more weight, he adds: "The stakes go up for even trivial decisions, and that pushes even more in the direction of looking at what other people have to say and letting that guide your own decisions."
As though the reviews themselves weren't enough, artificial intelligence is increasingly deciding which reviews people see and how they're interpreted, adding in a layer of complication for consumers and businesses alike.
Some platforms are using AI to summarize reviews, boiling down hundreds of opinions into a handful of sentences. This may help consumers get a general sense of the feedback and make the reviews section feel more useful, but it also has its drawbacks. Power users who like to comb through ratings aren't going to get a lot out of a summary, and while research shows that AI summaries increase purchase intention for products like electronics and appliances, they don't move the needle for experiences, like restaurants and hotels.