Insurance trust is rising, but largely because premiums are falling. That presents a challenge for insurers: trust built on price alone can disappear when prices rise again.
Our Trust Advantage 2026 research suggests verified reviews offer a more durable alternative. Consumers increasingly look for independent proof before buying, yet most insurers still limit review content to policy pages and comparison site listings rather than using it in the marketing that drives consideration.
Key takeaways
- Four in ten UK consumers check reviews before buying insurance.
- Insurance trust is recovering, but much of that recovery appears linked to falling premiums.
- Verified reviews in advertising increase purchase intent, yet most insurers still keep them at the end of the buying journey.
- Younger consumers remain vulnerable to ghost broking in channels where legitimate trust signals are often absent.
- Verified feedback can support both customer acquisition and Consumer Duty requirements.
More insurance buyers check reviews than many marketers realise
Insurance sits in an odd spot. It's not an impulse purchase, but it's also not the extended research journey a holiday or a car is. Cover is often renewed on autopilot, or sorted in a rush before a policy lapses.
Nonetheless, our research reveals that insurance is one of the categories where consumers are most likely to check reviews, with around 40–41% of consumers saying they'll definitely check reviews before buying. That's not a niche behaviour. For a sector selling trust as its core product, four in ten buyers actively verifying that trust before they commit is a significant commercial signal.
Trust in the insurance industry is improving, but its recovery may be fragile
Fairer Finance's Spring 2026 Trust in Insurance Index – shows trust rising in car and travel insurance and holding stable in pet and home, continuing a recovery that first appeared in Autumn 2025 after several years of decline. Claims satisfaction has improved across all four major sectors too, now averaging 60.03% – its highest level since 2019.
Fairer Finance's own reading of the data is that falling premiums – car insurance prices were down 9% year-on-year by February 2026, according to Confused.com – are the likely driver, a pattern the ABI's own tracker corroborates (average motor premiums fell from £622 to £562 between Q2 2024 and Q2 2025).
That’s only part of the story: a recovery tied to the pricing cycle is only as durable as that cycle, and claims inflation means prices won't necessarily keep falling. It's exactly the kind of gap that visible, verified proof is built to close – giving buyers a reason to trust a provider that isn't just "it got cheaper this quarter."
The trust gap ghost brokers are exploiting
Overall trust recovery doesn't mean every part of the market is equally protected – and the demographic most exposed to fraud is the same one least likely to check reviews.
FCA research found that around half (49%) of drivers aged 17–25 have bought a car insurance policy through social media or a messaging app, many of them fake. So-called "ghost brokers" pose as legitimate sellers, often issuing falsified or entirely bogus documents, leaving victims unknowingly uninsured and at risk of prosecution.
Our research shows 18-24s are also the age group least likely to check reviews before buying insurance, at just 29%. This is compared to ~41% for most other age bands. The pattern suggests a generation less inclined to verify before they buy is also the one most exposed to sellers with nothing genuine to verify. That's not proof of causation, but it does point to a real gap – young drivers aren't being reached by legitimate trust signals in the channels where they're actually shopping.
That's also where the opportunity sits. Ghost brokers operate almost exclusively on social media and messaging apps – the same channels where 18–24s spend most of their time, and where legitimate insurers and brokers are currently least visible with verified proof.
Bringing verified star ratings and review content into paid social, influencer partnerships and messaging-app presence would give this age group something concrete to fact check against, rather than leave the field open to these fraudulent alternatives.
The biggest missed opportunity in insurance marketing
Most insurers already collect reviews. The gap is where those reviews are allowed to do their work. Feedback tends to live on the policy page or the odd comparison-site listing, rarely making it into the paid search ad, comparison-site placement or social campaign that brought the buyer there.
That's the pattern: the social proof exists, but it's arriving too late in the journey to influence the decision it's meant to support.
Our Trust Advantage 2026 research found that two-thirds of UK consumers prefer to buy from brands that feature genuine reviews in their advertising. Adding a verified review logo lifts purchase intent by over 10%, compared to no review logo at all.
For brands already running reviews somewhere in their marketing, there's a further layer of opportunity. Consumers familiar with both are twice as likely to trust a purchaser-verified review over an open-platform one, and combining a purchaser-verified provider alongside an existing one lifts purchase intent to its highest measured point – 32.6%, a 2.8-point gain over relying on a single provider. Adding verified proof doesn't dilute an existing trust signal; it reinforces it.
For insurance, that gap carries more weight than most sectors. Much of the buying journey happens on comparison sites and through paid channels, competing on price alone, with no visible reputation attached to the quote. A policy that arrives with no verified trust signal is asking the buyer to decide on cost alone – exactly the basis Fairer Finance's data suggests the current trust recovery is sitting on, and exactly the thing verified reviews in advertising can add to it.
How leading insurers are turning reviews into competitive advantage
Some insurers are already treating verified feedback as a competitive differentiator rather than a compliance box to tick. Events Insurance, which covers 90% of UK events, switched from Trustpilot to Feefo after finding their previous platform delivered surface-level star ratings with little else behind them.
"People don't just buy insurance – they need to trust the provider first," says Dan Rose, then-Managing Director at Events Insurance. "Feefo's verified reviews give us that credibility. When customers see independent feedback, they know it's real."
The switch also gave the business full lifecycle feedback rather than a one-off rating at the point of sale – letting them track how clients feel throughout their policy, not just at purchase. That's a meaningfully different data set to work with when a regulator asks how you're listening to customers over time, not just at the moment they buy.
What insurance marketers should do next
The opportunity here isn't complicated: verified reviews already influence the buyers who check them, but most insurers still confine that proof to the policy page rather than putting it to work in the advertising and social content that brings buyers to the site.
Given that insurance trust currently looks more price-driven than earned, and that fraud is actively exploiting the exact channels where 18–24s are least likely to see legitimate verified proof, closing that gap matters more here than in most sectors.
The practical opportunity is threefold:
- Bring verified reviews into advertising and social, not just the policy page, particularly in the channels where fraud is currently unchallenged
- Use purchaser-verified reviews to strengthen trust alongside existing review sources
- Treat verified feedback data as evidence for Consumer Duty as well as a conversion tool.
Events Insurance's move from single-point star ratings to full lifecycle feedback is a useful model for what that looks like in practice – proof that's structural, not just decorative, and not dependent on the price of the next quote.
Verified, independently checkable reviews do double duty: they're a commercial trust signal for the buyers who do check, wherever they encounter it, and evidence of listening for the regulator that now requires it.
Read the full Trust Advantage report or book a consultation to learn more.
