The default home for book ratings, but it's an Amazon-owned open platform with little user verification, and reporting shows it can be swamped by review-bombing from fake accounts.
What it's really for A book-cataloging community (Amazon-owned); ratings are crowd averages from self-registered readers.
What our grade covers The grade on this page is about its crowd-average book ratings, not everything the site does.
High Scoring Confidence Checked against primary sources. We are confident in the facts and the grade here.
- Operating since
- 2007 (19 years) · source
- What it costs you
- Free to read The reviews are free to read.
- How they make money
- Crowdsourced book ratings and reviews from a self-registered reader community, surfaced as star averages and lists.
- What they do
- Goodreads lets users catalog books and post 1-to-5-star ratings and written reviews that aggregate into a public average rating per title.
- What to watch for
- Ratings come from largely unverified accounts, so a title's score can reflect organized campaigns rather than people who actually read the book, and critics say the platform's moderation is weak against this.
- Composite score
- 2.10 / 5.00 → grade C-
How the grade was reached
Does the site take money from the very entities it ranks? Pay-for-placement, vendor-funded data, and affiliate commissions all pull this down. The less the ranking can be bought, the higher the score.
What is the ranking actually built on? Hands-on testing scores highest, then verified first-hand reviews, then opinion or popularity surveys and self-reported figures, then pay-to-rank, which scores lowest.
Is the methodology published, specific, and reproducible? Can a reader see how a given rank was reached, or is it a black box?
Are commercial relationships, sponsorships, and affiliate arrangements disclosed clearly and near the rankings themselves, rather than buried?
How hard is it to game? Controls against fake reviews, solicited reviews, and vendor gaming raise this; an open box anyone can stuff lowers it.
Evidence
- Amazon announced its acquisition of Goodreads on March 28, 2013, when the site had more than 16 million members; Goodreads was founded in 2007 with co-founder Otis Chandler as CEO and operates as an Amazon subsidiary. Source: Amazon press release (acquisition announcement) →
- Amazon-owned Goodreads makes little effort to verify users, which critics say enables review-bombing, where a book is flooded with negative reviews, often from fake accounts, to drag down its rating; after the 2023 Cait Corrain case Goodreads said it would do more to detect and moderate violating accounts, but critics doubted it would catch low-level bombing. Source: NPR — Goodreads' review-bombing problem →
- Goodreads makes money through advertising, Amazon-affiliate 'Buy' button commissions (about 25% of revenue in 2022), and paid author/publisher giveaway packages — a Standard package around $119 and a Premium package around $599 that adds featured placement on the high-traffic Giveaways page. Source: Book Riot — How Does Goodreads Make Money? →