Skool Reviews Feature: How Star Ratings Work (2026)

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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.

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.

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.
Reviewer side	Reviews you leave also show on your own Skool profile.
Tenure display	Time as a member is shown, and turns green after the 90 day milestone.
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.

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.

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 member, and the display turns green once they pass the 90 day mark.

Skool's stated reasoning is that most churn happens in the first 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.

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.

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.

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. 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 a week 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.

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. 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.

FAQ

How do Skool reviews work?

Skool automatically prompts paying members to leave a star review on day 31 of their membership. Reviews appear on the community's About page once enough have been collected, and also on the reviewer's own Skool profile. Community owners cannot request or trigger reviews themselves.

Can I ask my members for a review on Skool?

No. Skool monitors community posts and direct messages for review solicitation. If it detects that you have asked for or incentivised reviews, it applies a red banner to your reviews stating they were incentivised, which is visible to every prospective member. Skool asks your members automatically, so there is no reason to ask.

Who can leave a review on a Skool community?

Only paying members. Free tier members and free trial members cannot leave reviews. Each paying member can leave one review, which they can edit later but not duplicate.

What does the green membership time on a Skool review mean?

It indicates the reviewer has been a member for more than 90 days. Skool highlights this because most churn happens within the first 90 days, so a review from someone past that milestone signals a member who stayed rather than one who may still leave.

Can I delete or hide a bad review on Skool?

Owners do not control which reviews appear. The system is designed so that the rating reflects genuine member experience rather than owner curation. The only reliable way to improve your rating is to improve the first 30 to 90 days of the member experience.

When did Skool launch reviews?

Skool announced Reviews in Skool News #69 on 11 August 2026. It was the "secret project" the team had been teasing in earlier episodes since July 2026.

🚀 Ready to build a community that earns five stars honestly? The free Skool Launch Planner turns your topic into a complete launch plan: positioning, pricing, outreach scripts and a 7-day roadmap to your first 20 members. About 2 minutes, no signup needed.

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Skool's New Reviews Feature: How Community Star Ratings Work (and the Rule That Catches Owners Out)