As someone who has been working on an honest web hosting review site for a decade now. You're totally right. I see the same pattern in this article talking about fake review sites. The biggest offender in hosting was Endurance International Group who owned so many major brands and gobbled them up. You'd often find any ranking full of the brands they owned (BlueHost, HostGator, iPage, JustHost, Site5, Arvixe, etc, etc, etc).

Since you're really skeptical, I'd love to hear your take on what I've done (and been doing) in terms of trying to create an honest system.

The gist is, I scrape Twitter data, filter out spam, affiliate links, etc, and use sentiment analysis to see which brands people actually like. My hypothesis was that reviews are fundamentally a weird human behavior. The real 'reviews' are embedded in normal conversation when you talk to people. With enough data of these signals, you can get a much better picture of what people really think. The results seem to line up basically like an NPS measurement.

https://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/compare has all my data if you want to see how the rankings actually look. Not every company has an affiliate program. Many smaller companies aren't listed because I can't get enough data.