Consumer Reports is an independent, nonprofit American organization that tests products and services, publishes ratings and reviews, conducts consumer research, investigates marketplace issues, and advocates for consumer protection.
Founded in 1936, Consumer Reports, commonly abbreviated as CR, is best known for putting products through controlled testing rather than simply collecting opinions from people who purchased them. It evaluates everything from automobiles and refrigerators to mattresses, televisions, printers, food, financial services, privacy practices, and other products and services consumers encounter every day.
Unlike most commercial review websites, Consumer Reports does not sell traditional advertising and does not accept free products from manufacturers for testing. It purchases the products it tests through normal retail channels so manufacturers generally cannot provide specially selected review samples. Consumer Reports says this independence is fundamental to the way the organization operates.
But Consumer Reports is much more than a product review website.
Its work includes laboratory testing, surveys of hundreds of thousands of consumers, investigative journalism, product safety research, reliability studies, consumer education, and advocacy for laws and industry standards intended to protect consumers.
What Exactly Is Consumer Reports?
Consumer Reports is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in the United States. Its stated mission is to create a marketplace built around truth, transparency, and fairness for consumers.
The organization traces its origins to Consumers Union, which was chartered in New York in February 1936. Its founding charter specifically called for providing consumers with information about goods and services and maintaining laboratories capable of conducting product research and testing.
The publication that eventually became Consumer Reports was originally called Consumers Union Reports. Today, Consumer Reports operates as both the name of the organization and its well-known consumer publication and digital platform.
That history matters because Consumer Reports was created for a fundamentally different purpose than most modern review websites.
It was not established as a media company trying to attract advertisers or as an affiliate website built around sending shoppers to retailers. Its original purpose was to give consumers an independent source of information at a time when shoppers had far fewer ways to verify manufacturers’ advertising claims.
Consumer Reports continues to describe itself as an independent nonprofit member organization.
What Does Consumer Reports Do?
Product reviews are the part of Consumer Reports most people recognize, but the organization operates across several related areas.
Consumer Reports Tests Products
Testing is at the heart of the Consumer Reports model.
Rather than relying exclusively on manufacturer specifications or reviewer impressions, CR employs scientists, engineers, researchers, technicians, journalists, statisticians, and subject matter experts to evaluate products.
Consumer Reports says more than 140 scientists, researchers, and technicians participate in its product-testing work. The organization reports spending tens of millions of dollars annually buying and testing products.
The exact testing procedure depends on the product.
A refrigerator cannot be evaluated in the same way as a mattress, television, coffee maker, vehicle, or printer.
For example, Consumer Reports tests coffee makers for factors including brewing temperature, brewing time, coffee concentration, ease of use, and cleaning. Printers may be evaluated across hundreds of individual data points involving text, graphics, speed, ink or toner use, scanning, copying, and other functions.
Cars receive an especially extensive testing process.
Consumer Reports operates a 327-acre automotive test facility in Connecticut, where vehicles can be evaluated for acceleration, braking, emergency handling, fuel economy, ride quality, noise, usability, safety systems, and other characteristics.
This type of controlled testing is one of the biggest differences between Consumer Reports and ordinary customer-review platforms.
Consumer Reports Buys the Products It Tests
Another important feature of the Consumer Reports system is that manufacturers generally do not supply the products being tested.
Consumer Reports says its secret shoppers purchase test products through normal retail channels. That includes automobiles.
Why does that matter?
Review publications that accept free products can potentially receive carefully selected samples from manufacturers. Even when no manipulation takes place, receiving thousands of dollars in free merchandise can create questions about the relationship between a reviewer and the company being reviewed.
Buying products independently helps Consumer Reports reduce that potential conflict.
It also means the item CR receives should theoretically be similar to the item an ordinary customer could purchase.
Consumer Reports Surveys Owners
Laboratory performance can tell you how well a product works when it is new.
It cannot always tell you what happens three, five, or ten years later.
That is where Consumer Reports’ large member surveys become particularly valuable.
CR collects information from its members about products they own, including reliability problems and owner satisfaction. Those survey results can then be incorporated into ratings for certain product categories.
Automobiles provide one of the clearest examples.
For its 2025 vehicle reliability research, Consumer Reports received information involving approximately 380,000 vehicles, covering model years from 2000 through 2025, along with some early 2026 models. Owners were asked about serious problems they had experienced during the previous 12 months across a variety of vehicle systems.
Consumer Reports then analyzes those responses to estimate the predicted reliability of newer vehicles.
This combination of controlled testing and large-scale ownership data gives CR something neither laboratory testing nor internet reviews can provide by themselves.
How Do Consumer Reports Ratings Work?
There is a common misconception that every Consumer Reports rating is produced using one universal formula.
That is not the case.
Consumer Reports develops testing criteria appropriate for individual product categories. Different products therefore have different tests, measurements, scoring factors, and weighting.
Many Consumer Reports products receive an Overall Score, often expressed on a 100-point scale, but what contributes to that score varies.
A coffee maker may be evaluated primarily on brewing performance, convenience, reliability, and owner satisfaction.
A vehicle’s Overall Score is far more complex.
Consumer Reports currently combines four major components when calculating a vehicle’s Overall Score:
- Road-test performance
- Predicted reliability
- Owner satisfaction
- Safety
Safety can include crash-test information, collision-avoidance technology, driver-monitoring systems, and other considerations.
This is an important distinction.
A Consumer Reports score is not simply a reviewer’s subjective opinion converted into a number.
It may combine laboratory measurements, expert evaluations, survey data, statistical predictions, safety information, and other evidence depending on the category being evaluated.
What Does a Consumer Reports Recommendation Mean?
A high Consumer Reports score and a Consumer Reports recommendation are related, but they are not necessarily identical concepts.
For vehicles, for example, CR requires a model to achieve a sufficiently high Overall Score within its category before receiving a recommendation. Reliability, safety, road-test performance, and owner satisfaction can all affect whether the recommendation is awarded.
Recommendations can also change.
If new reliability data reveals unexpected problems with a vehicle, Consumer Reports can remove its recommendation even if that vehicle originally performed well during testing.
That illustrates an important feature of Consumer Reports ratings: they can evolve as new evidence becomes available.
A review published when a product launches is not necessarily the final word on that product.
Is Consumer Reports Really Independent?
Independence is one of Consumer Reports’ central selling points.
Consumer Reports does not sell traditional advertising, says it does not accept corporate freebies for the products it tests, and has maintained restrictions on commercial use of its ratings since its founding.
The organization is primarily supported through sources such as memberships, subscriptions, donations, grants, publications, services, and other nonprofit revenue.
There is one nuance worth understanding.
Some Consumer Reports pages include links to retailers, and CR states that it may receive affiliate commissions when consumers shop through certain retailer links. It says those proceeds support its nonprofit mission.
That does not make Consumer Reports the same thing as a conventional affiliate review site, particularly because CR purchases and independently tests products. But it is still useful context for understanding how the modern organization operates.
Can Companies Advertise That Consumer Reports Recommended Their Product?
Not freely.
Consumer Reports has maintained a No Commercial Use Policy since 1936.
Businesses generally cannot simply take a favorable Consumer Reports rating, put it in an advertisement, and imply that CR officially endorses their product.
Consumer Reports restricts commercial use of its name, ratings, recommendations, trademarks, and published findings unless appropriate permission or licensing has been obtained.
Its policy is specifically intended to prevent companies from removing ratings from context or misleading shoppers about the nature of a Consumer Reports finding.
This is another significant difference between Consumer Reports and many awards, badges, or review programs that are specifically designed to be promoted by participating companies.
Is Consumer Reports a Government Agency?
No.
Consumer Reports is not part of the United States government.
It is an independent nonprofit organization.
This can sometimes cause confusion because Consumer Reports frequently conducts safety investigations, reports on recalls, advocates for regulations, and interacts with government agencies.
It may also study issues that eventually become the subject of government rules.
But Consumer Reports itself does not have regulatory authority.
It cannot order a company to recall a product, impose a fine, pass a law, or force a manufacturer to change a product.
What it can do is publish research, inform consumers, pressure companies, advocate for policy changes, and present evidence that regulators or legislators may subsequently use.
Consumer Reports Is Also a Consumer Advocacy Organization
Product ratings are only part of Consumer Reports’ history.
CR also operates an advocacy program focused on product safety, financial fairness, health, privacy, sustainability, and other marketplace issues.
Over its history, Consumer Reports and its predecessor organization have been involved in campaigns concerning vehicle safety, child car seats, cigarettes, financial regulation, food safety, toxic chemicals, data privacy, predatory lending, and many other consumer issues.
One famous example involves automobile seat belts.
Consumer Reports’ predecessor tested seat belts in the 1950s and found serious problems with many of them. The organization advocated for stronger standards, and seat belts were eventually required in front seats of new American cars in 1968.
Consumer Reports also began testing child safety seats in the 1970s, with its work contributing to stronger government standards.
In 1953, the publication warned its readers about the dangers of cigarette smoking, more than a decade before the U.S. Surgeon General’s landmark 1964 report on smoking and health.
These examples help explain why Consumer Reports is better understood as a consumer protection organization that also publishes product ratings, rather than simply a magazine that reviews refrigerators and cars.
What Products Does Consumer Reports Review?
The range is enormous.
Consumer Reports covers major categories such as automobiles, appliances, electronics, home products, mattresses, lawn and garden equipment, baby products, health products, food, financial products, insurance, internet services, privacy, home improvement products, and more.
Its website contains thousands of ratings across numerous product and service categories.
But not everything Consumer Reports writes about undergoes laboratory testing.
Some topics are investigated through surveys, market research, investigative journalism, expert analysis, data analysis, or reviews of scientific evidence instead.
That distinction is important whenever someone says that a product was “reviewed by Consumer Reports.”
You should determine exactly what Consumer Reports did.
Was the individual product physically tested?
Was the brand included in a reliability survey?
Was the company merely mentioned in an article?
Was CR reporting on a safety issue?
Those are very different things.
Consumer Reports vs. Customer Reviews
Consumer Reports should not be confused with ordinary customer reviews.
A customer review typically represents the experience of one person who purchased or used a product.
That information can be useful.
Thousands of customer reviews can reveal recurring problems, unusual failure patterns, shipping issues, customer-service complaints, or long-term experiences that might not appear during laboratory testing.
But customer reviews also have weaknesses.
Reviews can be fake, manipulated, incentivized, emotionally driven, written by people who used the product incorrectly, or skewed toward unusually satisfied or unusually unhappy customers.
Consumer Reports attempts to answer a different question.
Instead of asking, “What did people online say about this product?” CR attempts to determine, “How does this product perform when evaluated according to standardized criteria, and what does broader ownership data tell us about reliability and satisfaction?”
Both kinds of evidence can be useful, but they are not interchangeable.
Consumer Reports vs. “Consumer Reports”
There is also an important language distinction.
Consumer Reports, capitalized, is the name of the nonprofit organization and publication.
A consumer report, written generically, can simply mean a report about consumers, customer experiences, complaints, market research, credit information, or product performance.
The phrase “consumer reports” therefore does not automatically mean information came from Consumer Reports.
This distinction becomes particularly important when researching products online.
A page titled something like “XYZ Supplement Consumer Reports” may have no connection whatsoever with the nonprofit organization Consumer Reports.
It may simply be a privately operated website using the phrase to describe reviews or consumer experiences.
The safest way to determine whether Consumer Reports itself evaluated something is to look for the product or company directly on ConsumerReports.org.
Consumer Reports Is Not the Same as ConsumerAffairs
Another common source of confusion is ConsumerAffairs.
ConsumerAffairs is a separate company and website that publishes consumer reviews, company profiles, buyer guides, and other information.
It is not Consumer Reports.
Likewise, Consumer Reports is not the Better Business Bureau, Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Trustpilot, Amazon reviews, Reddit, Yelp, or any other review or consumer-protection platform.
Each organization gathers information in a different way and serves a different purpose.
Can You Trust Consumer Reports?
Consumer Reports has built an unusually strong reputation for independence because of its nonprofit structure, refusal to accept manufacturer-supplied test products, controlled testing, large member surveys, and long history of consumer advocacy.
That does not mean every Consumer Reports rating should be treated as an unquestionable fact.
Testing methodology always involves choices.
CR must decide which characteristics matter, how to measure them, how much weight each characteristic receives, what sample sizes are adequate, and how survey results should influence predictions.
A particular shopper may also value different things than Consumer Reports does.
For example, two televisions could receive similar scores even though one is clearly better for a particular buyer’s priorities.
Likewise, predicted reliability is a statistical estimate. It cannot guarantee whether the individual car or appliance sitting in your home will fail.
The best way to use Consumer Reports is therefore not to treat it as an oracle.
Treat it as one of the strongest independent sources of structured consumer-product evidence available, then combine that evidence with your own priorities, price comparisons, warranty information, specialized expert reviews, recall information, and credible owner experiences.
Why Consumer Reports Still Matters in the Internet Review Era
It might seem that a publication created in 1936 would become less important once consumers gained access to millions of online reviews.
In some ways, the opposite happened.
The internet created an extraordinary amount of consumer information, but it also created an extraordinary amount of noise.
Consumers now encounter fake reviews, undisclosed sponsorships, influencer promotions, AI-generated articles, affiliate marketing, paid placements, review manipulation, selectively distributed product samples, and websites created primarily to rank in search engines.
More information does not automatically mean better information.
Consumer Reports occupies an unusual position because its fundamental model predates most of those incentives.
Its laboratories allow products to be compared under controlled conditions.
Its surveys provide large collections of ownership data.
Its nonprofit structure reduces dependence on advertisers and manufacturers.
Its journalists can investigate broader consumer issues.
And its advocacy division can pursue marketplace changes after a problem is identified.
That combination is difficult for an ordinary review website to reproduce.
Does Consumer Reports Review Every Product?
No.
There are far too many products entering the market for Consumer Reports to physically test everything.
CR must decide which categories and individual products are worth purchasing, researching, and testing.
That means the absence of a product from Consumer Reports does not mean the product is bad, fraudulent, unsafe, or illegitimate.
It may simply mean Consumer Reports has never tested it.
This is particularly important with niche products, new brands, supplements, specialized equipment, direct-response products, and items sold primarily online.
If someone searches for “[Product Name] Consumer Reports” and finds nothing on ConsumerReports.org, the correct conclusion is generally:
Consumer Reports does not appear to have published a rating or test of that product.
It would be incorrect to turn that absence of coverage into either an endorsement or a warning.
How to Check Whether Consumer Reports Actually Reviewed a Product
When researching a claim involving Consumer Reports, begin with the source itself.
Search ConsumerReports.org for the exact product name, manufacturer, or product category.
Then look carefully at what the resulting page actually says.
A product could appear on the Consumer Reports website because CR tested it, mentioned it in an article, discussed a recall involving it, included its manufacturer in a survey, or compared the broader product category.
Those are not the same thing.
You should be especially skeptical of advertisements or independent websites claiming something is “Consumer Reports recommended” without linking to evidence supporting that claim.
Consumer Reports specifically restricts commercial use of its ratings in part because taking those findings out of context can mislead consumers.
Is Consumer Reports Free?
Consumer Reports publishes a mixture of publicly accessible information and material available to members.
Some articles, investigations, buying advice, recall information, and consumer guidance can be read publicly, while detailed ratings and other premium resources may require membership.
Consumer Reports has historically also published a print magazine, which remains one of the best-known consumer publications in the United States.
The organization says it has millions of members and reaches a much larger audience through its print, digital, and media operations.
The Bottom Line: What Is Consumer Reports?
Consumer Reports is an independent nonprofit consumer organization founded in 1936 that tests products, analyzes reliability data, surveys consumers, publishes ratings and investigations, and advocates for consumer protection.
Its defining characteristics are not simply that it publishes reviews.
What makes Consumer Reports unusual is the combination of independent product purchasing, standardized testing, large-scale consumer surveys, investigative journalism, nonprofit funding, restrictions on advertising, and consumer advocacy.
That does not mean Consumer Reports is infallible, nor does it mean its rating should be the only factor used when buying something.
It does mean that a genuine Consumer Reports test carries substantially more evidentiary weight than an anonymous online review, promotional article, manufacturer testimonial, or website merely using the words “consumer reports.”
And that distinction may be the most important thing to understand about Consumer Reports in the first place.
When you see the words Consumer Reports, ask one simple question:
Are we talking about the actual nonprofit organization Consumer Reports, or are we merely talking about reports and reviews written by consumers?
Those are two very different things.
