When a response is rejected, the reward is withheld and your trust score takes a hit. The good news: rejections are highly predictable. Across the platform, five patterns account for the overwhelming majority of flags.
1. Speeding through questions
Survey completion time being measured during an online questionnaire.
Every survey has an estimated completion time. Responses finished faster than 20% of that estimate are automatically flagged - if a 10-minute survey was completed in 90 seconds, no reviewer will believe the answers were read. The fix costs you nothing: read at a natural pace. The reward is the same whether you finish in 4 minutes or 9.
2. Failing attention checks
Participant carefully reading instructions in an online survey.
Surveys randomly inject instructions like "Please select 'Strongly disagree' for this question." They exist purely to verify you are reading. Missing one is the fastest way to lose a reward, because it is unambiguous evidence of inattention - there is no appeal that explains it away.
3. Straight-lining ratings
Survey response pattern displayed across multiple rating-scale questions.
Picking the same option for every rating question tells the system you stopped reading. The detector triggers when more than 85% of your rating answers are identical - a threshold chosen after testing on hundreds of studies, so genuine agreement does not get punished. If you truly feel the same about every item, you are safe; if you are clicking the same column to finish faster, you are not.
4. One-word open answers
Open-text questions are scored for length, gibberish patterns, and character repetition. "good", "asdfgh", and "aaaaaa" all score as low effort. One or two genuine sentences is all it takes - researchers consistently rate open-text quality as the thing they pay premium panels for.
5. Using a VPN to fake your location
Security systems verifying participant location and account authenticity.
Researchers pay for responses from specific countries, so geo-validation compares your IP against the survey's allowed list, and duplicate-IP detection flags addresses shared by three or more completed responses. A VPN does not just get one response rejected - it undermines the account's credibility on every future study.
All five checks feed the platform-wide trust score. Stay clear of them and the score climbs on its own - along with the value of the studies you are invited to.