How to Choose a Tutor: Stop Asking Questions. Start Verifying Claims.

2. Start with the oldest evidence you can find

One of the first things worth knowing is: how long has this tutor actually been operating?

Worth noticing: "15+ years of experience" or "established in 2010" are statements made by the business about itself. True or not, they aren't independent evidence.

Look for external signals instead. For an online tutor, the history of their Google Business Profile is a useful starting point. Google's own help documentation confirms that the date shown on a review is its publication date, and that editing a review updates that date to the edit, not the original post. That gives the oldest surviving review a genuine lower-bound signal — not proof of a tutor's full career, since older reviews can disappear and private work before a profile existed leaves no trace, but a documented floor: this is how far back the public record goes, at minimum.

The honest conclusion is "this profile has publicly documented feedback going back to at least this date" — weaker than the tutor's own claim of total experience, but far stronger than simply believing a website footer.

4. Add a second layer of verification

Suppose a review says: "My daughter was struggling with IB Mathematics, and this tutor helped her achieve an excellent result."

Useful social proof — but what else can you establish? Does the reviewer have a public professional or academic profile? Is the identity consistent with the testimonial? This isn't about investigating someone's private life; it's about checking whether the review sits inside a broader, publicly consistent identity. A named testimonial is stronger evidence than an anonymous one, and a testimonial connected to a genuine, findable profile is stronger still — not proof, but triangulation, which is generally stronger than one isolated claim.

A review can be genuine without being independently verifiable by the person reading it. That's exactly why triangulation, not any single review, is the unit of evidence that matters.

6. Look at how negative feedback is handled, not just how positive feedback is collected

Most people evaluating a review system look at how positive reviews are solicited. It's just as informative to look at what happens to negative ones — the two don't always follow the same process.

Superprof's own published policy for students describes what happens when a review is negative: its team contacts the student, then the tutor, and the tutor receives a warning. There isn't a published equivalent process described for positive reviews. That's simply a difference worth knowing about, not evidence that any platform is doing something improper — and it's the kind of detail that isn't visible from a star rating alone.

Checking how a platform handles negative feedback takes about two minutes, and it's a step most parents don't think to take.

For context, Google updated its own policies in April 2026 to prohibit review quotas and pre-written review content, and its enforcement report for 2025 cites more than 292 million policy-violating reviews blocked or removed — a sign of how actively these systems need to be moderated, not a claim about any one platform.

8. What about Trustpilot?

Third-party platforms add a layer of separation from a business's own website, which is valuable — but the same rule applies: read the methodology, don't just trust the badge.

Trustpilot states that it runs automated fraud-detection screening across every review posted, and that it labels some reviews "Verified" specifically when it can confirm a business interaction took place — implicitly conceding that unverified reviews, while still genuine opinions, don't carry that same confirmation. That's a meaningfully stronger disclosure than most platforms offer. The right takeaway isn't "Trustpilot equals automatically trustworthy" — it's that a platform with a documented, checkable methodology gives you one more layer of evidence you can actually evaluate, rather than one more badge to take on faith.

10. Knowing the subject and teaching it are not the same skill

A person can be excellent at mathematics and a poor mathematics tutor. The reverse is also true.

The Education Endowment Foundation's evidence review on one-to-one tuition identifies specific implementation factors that separate effective tuition from simply reducing the student-to-teacher ratio: accurately identifying which students need support, understanding the specific learning gaps involved, and, critically, well-planned feedback. That's a far more demanding picture of tutoring than "the tutor knows the subject," and it's also a picture that's hard to fake in a single conversation, but easy to test with the right question: not "do you know IB Mathematics," but "how do you determine whether a student is struggling with the underlying maths, the use of the GDC, exam technique, or how the question is phrased?" A tutor who has actually done this work can answer immediately, with specifics. A tutor reciting a marketing line cannot.

12. Build an evidence stack

There's no single test for choosing a tutor. Build a stack instead.

The interview hasn't disappeared. It has moved to the correct place in the process — after the research, not before it. Once you know a tutor has real IB experience, the useful question stops being "do you know IB Mathematics?" and becomes "how do you tell the difference between a student who doesn't understand the maths and one who doesn't understand what the question is asking?" That's a question a marketing slogan can't answer.

Call it what it is: an evidence stack — a short, repeatable list of checks, not a single gut-feeling conversation.

14. The bigger picture

None of this is unique to tutoring. Unverifiable experience claims, inflated review counts, and content written for search engines rather than accuracy are symptoms of a wider shift: generative tools have made credible-looking content easier to produce than ever, and regulation is still catching up. In the US, the FTC's 2024 rule banning fake and incentivised reviews reflects that shift — it allows for civil penalties of up to $53,088 per violation (adjusted annually under 16 CFR 1.98), though enforcement against smaller, individual actors in a global market remains difficult in practice.

The takeaway isn't cynicism — it's a bit of methodical care. Everything in the checklist above takes under thirty minutes, and while it won't guarantee you find the right tutor, it meaningfully improves the odds of seeing past a well-built website to what's actually there.

In a market where credible-looking content is increasingly easy to produce, the signals that keep their value are the ones that are hard to fake: a dated review from a verifiable student, a multi-year record of activity, and claims that stay consistent wherever you happen to check them.