Skool just added star ratings to every community on the platform. Announced in Skool News #69 on 11 August 2026, Reviews is the feature Skool had been teasing as its “secret project” since July, and it changes something fundamental: for the first time, a prospective member can see what existing paying members actually think before handing over any money.
Updated 28 September 2026. Six weeks in, Reviews has grown well past a launch feature. Skool reviews now show up in Google search results, Skool built a “review of reviews” moderation layer, it removed the button most negative reviews were coming from, and it shared a finding every owner should hear: some communities with a few negative reviews convert better than ones with a perfect five stars. Everything below is checked against Skool’s own broadcast notes, and the new material sits in the three sections after the step-by-step table.
If you run a Skool community, this is the most consequential update of the year for your conversion rate. If you are still deciding whether to build on Skool, it is a strong signal about where the platform is heading. This guide covers how Reviews works, who can leave one, the anti gaming rules that will bite owners who get this wrong, and what to do about it this week. If you want to see it inside your own community, you can start a free 14-day Skool trial here.
The short answer: what Skool Reviews is
Skool Reviews is a star rating system attached to every community. Paying members are automatically prompted to leave a review after 31 days of membership. Once a community has collected enough reviews, they appear publicly on its About page, which is the page every prospective member lands on before they join. Since September 2026 they also surface in Google when someone searches for the community.
Three things make it different from the review systems you are used to:
- Owners cannot request reviews. Skool asks on your behalf, automatically. Asking for them yourself carries a penalty.
- Only paying members can leave one. Free members and free trial members are excluded entirely.
- Reviewer tenure is visible. How long someone has been a member is displayed alongside their review, so a rating from a long standing member visibly carries more weight than one from a brand new member.
The plainest analogy is Yelp for communities, except that the platform, not the business owner, controls who gets asked.
How Skool Reviews works, step by step
| Element | How it works |
|---|---|
| Who gets asked | Paying members only. No free tier members, no free trial members. |
| When they get asked | Automatically on day 31 of paid membership. |
| Who does the asking | Skool. The owner takes no action and cannot trigger a prompt. |
| How many reviews per member | One. It can be edited afterwards, but not duplicated. |
| Where reviews appear | The community About page, once enough have been collected, and since September 2026 in Google search results. |
| Moderation | A "review of reviews" process screens submissions in the background before they go live. |
| Reviewer side | Reviews you leave also show on your own Skool profile. |
| Tenure display | Time as a paying member is shown, and turns from grey to green at three months. |
| Gaming penalty | A red banner on your reviews declaring they were incentivised. |
The 31 day timing is deliberate. It sits just past the first monthly renewal, so the member has paid twice and had a full cycle inside the community. That is long enough to form a real opinion, and early enough that Skool captures feedback before the churn window closes.
Skool reviews now show up in Google
On Skool News #73 (8 September 2026) Skool announced that community reviews now show in Google. In practice that means the star rating on your About page is no longer something a prospect only sees after they have already clicked through to Skool. It can now be part of what they see when they type your community’s name into a search bar.
That changes the job reviews do. At launch they were an in-platform trust signal, useful at the moment of joining. In Google they become a reputation surface, sitting in front of people who heard your name on a podcast, in a YouTube video or from a friend and went to check you out. Those are warm prospects, and the first thing they now see may be what your members think of you.
Two practical consequences:
- Search your own community name this week. Look at what appears, in an incognito window, the way a stranger would. If your community name is generic, consider whether it is distinctive enough for people to find you at all.
- Your first 31 days are now a search result. Everything in the owner checklist further down this page matters more than it did in August, because the rating it produces travels further.
Why a few bad reviews may help you
The most counterintuitive thing Skool has said about Reviews came on Skool News #70 (18 August 2026): some communities with negative reviews convert better than communities with nothing but five stars.
It sounds wrong until you think about how you read reviews yourself. A page of flawless five star ratings looks curated, and people discount it. A page where one member says “great content, but the calls clash with my time zone” reads as real, and it answers a question the prospect had anyway. A specific, minor complaint tells the reader what the worst case looks like, and for most buyers the worst case being “the calls are at an awkward hour” is reassuring rather than off-putting.
Skool also ran an A/B test of showing reviews against showing none while it rolled the feature out, which tells you how seriously it treats reviews as a conversion lever rather than a nice-to-have.
What this means for owners:
- Do not panic over one three star review. Handled well, it is doing work for you.
- Read the negative ones for the pattern, not the tone. If two members raise the same issue, that is your next fix, and fixing it is the only lever you have.
- Do not chase a perfect score. Communities that try to engineer five stars tend to end up asking for reviews, which is the one thing that gets you the red banner.
How the rollout has changed since August
Skool has adjusted Reviews almost every week since launch. The changes that matter, in order:
| Date (Skool News) | What changed |
|---|---|
| 11 Aug (#69) | Reviews launched: paying members asked on day 31, owners barred from asking. |
| 18 Aug (#70) | Almost 15,000 reviews collected, about 3,800 on launch day. A "review of reviews" moderation process added in the background. Gradual rollout to more About pages. |
| 25 Aug (#71) | Over 20,000 reviews. A/B testing reviews against no reviews. Full release to everyone once the moderation step was in effect. |
| 1 Sep (#72) | Skool tracked where reviews came from and found most negative ones were coming from the membership settings screen, so it removed that entry point. Work started on making "paying member since" accurate. |
| 8 Sep (#73) | Reviews now show in Google. |
The membership settings change is worth understanding. That screen is where members go when they are thinking about cancelling, so a review prompt there caught people at their most irritated moment. Removing it means reviews now lean towards the day 31 prompt, which is a fairer read of the whole experience. If your rating dipped in August, this may be part of why, and it should even out.
The rule that will catch owners out: do not ask for reviews
This is the part to read twice, because it inverts the instinct that every other platform has trained into you.
On Amazon, on Trustpilot, on G2, on the App Store, asking customers for reviews is standard practice. Whole businesses exist to automate the asking. On Skool, soliciting reviews is a punishable offence.
Skool monitors community posts and direct messages for review solicitation. If it detects that you have asked for reviews, offered anything in exchange for them, or coordinated members to leave them, it applies a red banner to your reviews stating they were incentivised. Every prospective member then sees that banner sitting directly above your ratings, on the page where they decide whether to join.
Think about what that does. A five star average with a red warning label attached is worse than no reviews at all, because it converts a neutral absence of information into an active trust signal pointing the wrong way. You would be paying for social proof with your credibility, and losing on the trade. Now that reviews reach Google, the cost of that trade has gone up.
Skool also shows admins an in product warning notice explaining the rules, so nobody can claim they did not know.
The practical instruction is simple, and it is the opposite of what most marketing advice will tell you:
- Do not post “please leave us a review” in your community feed.
- Do not DM members asking for a rating, however politely.
- Do not offer points, bonuses, free months, shoutouts or anything else in exchange.
- Do not run a “review drive” or coordinate a launch push.
- Do nothing at all. Skool will ask for you, on schedule, without your involvement.
The uncomfortable but accurate summary: the only lever you have over your review score is the quality of the community itself. That is almost certainly why Skool designed it this way.
Why paying members only matters more than it sounds
Excluding free members and free trial members from leaving reviews is the quiet design decision that makes the whole system credible.
Every open review platform has the same failure mode: free accounts are cheap to create, so ratings can be manufactured at scale by anyone willing to spin up throwaway profiles. By requiring an active paid subscription, Skool has attached a real financial cost to every single review. A person cannot leave a rating without having paid you, twice, and stayed for a month.
That does two useful things at once. It makes negative review bombing genuinely expensive for a bad actor, and it makes positive reviews harder to fake than on almost any comparable platform. The reviews you do collect will be sparse compared to a public review site, but each one carries far more information.
If you are weighing Skool against alternatives, this is worth registering alongside the pricing structure and the rest of what shipped this year. Platforms that let anyone rate anything end up with review sections nobody trusts.
The 90 day tenure marker and what it tells you
Alongside each review, Skool shows how long that person has been a paying member, and the display goes from grey to green at three months.
Skool’s stated reasoning is that churn drops sharply after 90 days. A member who has stayed past that point has survived the window where people typically decide a community is not for them, so their opinion is a different class of evidence to a day 31 review from someone who may still leave next month. Skool has also been working on making the “paying member since” date accurate, so the marker reflects real paid tenure.
For prospective members, this is a useful reading tool. A community with several green tenure reviews is showing you people who stayed. For owners, it is a quiet incentive that rewards retention rather than acquisition, which is a meaningful shift in what the platform is nudging you towards. Our guide to Skool member retention tactics covers the first 90 days in detail.
One small side effect worth knowing: Skool has retired the star emoji it previously used on the top percentage community badge, because stars now unambiguously mean reviews.
If you have been sitting on a community idea and this is the update that makes the platform feel more legitimate to you, the lowest risk way to test it is to start a free trial and build out your About page properly.
What owners should actually do this week
You cannot influence reviews directly, so everything useful happens upstream of them. Here is the practical list, in the order that matters.
1. Fix the first 30 days. Your review score is now decided by what a member experiences before day 31. Map that period honestly. Does a new member get a clear first action within an hour of joining? Do they get a reply to their first post? Do they know what they are supposed to do in week one? Most communities have a strong sales page and a vague first month, and that gap is now priced into a public star rating that also appears in Google.
2. Fix the 30 to 90 day stretch. The green tenure marker means members who stay past 90 days visibly boost your credibility. Anything that improves retention now has a compounding second benefit. Regular calls, a predictable weekly rhythm and visible progress markers all do this.
3. Audit your promises. Reviews punish the gap between what your About page implies and what a member receives. If your positioning is overstated by even a little, the reviews will surface it in public and permanently. Better to trim the claim now than have it corrected for you.
4. Do not touch the reviews themselves. Repeat this to any team member or moderator with posting rights. One well meaning “hey everyone, please rate us” post can attach a red banner to your community.
5. Search your own name. See what a stranger sees in Google, and whether your reviews appear next to it.
6. Watch your competitors’ pages. Reviews are public on every community’s About page. That is a free, continuous read on what members in your niche complain about and value, and it did not exist two months ago.
If you are still shaping the idea rather than running a community yet, our free Skool launch planner turns your topic into a positioning, pricing and first 20 members plan in about two minutes, and our worked niche plans show what a first month looks like for barbers, dog trainers, wedding photographers and more.
What this means if you are choosing a platform
For anyone weighing whether to build on Skool, Reviews cuts in a direction that is easy to miss.
The most common criticism of Skool has never really been about the software. It is that the platform hosts a wide range of community quality, from excellent to abandoned, and a prospective member has had almost no way to tell them apart before paying. That is the genuine grievance underneath most negative commentary about the platform, as our roundup of what real users say about Skool covers in detail.
Reviews attacks that problem directly and at the platform level. Over the next few months, the communities that deliver will start carrying visible evidence that they deliver, and the ones that do not will start carrying visible evidence of that too. If you intend to run a good community, this is straightforwardly good news: the ceiling on trust just went up, and the people cutting corners lost their camouflage.
It also fits a clear 2026 pattern. Skool has spent the year removing reasons not to build on it. Hobby plan parity removed the cost objection at $9 a month. The Discovery page and community keywords turned the platform into a growth channel. Language support removed the geography objection. Reviews now attacks the trust objection. Each of those widens the top of Skool’s funnel, and by extension yours. We track every meaningful change on our Skool platform news roundup.
The economics behind it have not changed. Skool is still two plans: Hobby at $9 a month with a 10% transaction fee, and Pro at $99 a month with a 2.9% fee. The feature sets are identical, so the only real decision is the fee maths, and both come with a 14-day free trial with no card required. Fifty members at $29 a month is $1,450 in recurring revenue from a $9 platform, and that revenue now sits behind public star ratings that reward you for actually being good at it.
The bottom line
Skool Reviews takes the single hardest thing to fake, the opinion of people who have paid you and stayed, and puts it on the page where buying decisions get made, and now in the search results that come before that page. Owners have no lever except the community itself, which is exactly the point.
The action for this week is not a marketing campaign. It is an honest look at what the first 31 days inside your community feel like, because that is now what your public rating measures. And if you have been waiting for Skool to feel like a more serious, more accountable place to build, this is the update that does it.
The fastest way to judge it is to look at a few About pages in your niche and see what members are saying. If it makes you want to build something better, start your free 14-day trial and get your first 30 days right from the start.