What Recommendations Can You Trust?
Sadly, Most Mattress Advice Is Wrong – for You
Your friend or co-worker just loves their mattress and helpfully suggests that you buy the same one. But is your friend is the same size and weight as you? Do they sleep in the same position as you? Do they like the same amount of softness as you? How about memory feel? Bounce? Cushioning depth? Do they have the same needs as you in terms of temperature? What about motion isolation? Edge support? Adjustable base compatibility? And so on. The key thing about mattresses is that they are highly personal. So if the answers to any of these questions is 'no,' then someone else's recommendation – as well-meaning as it is – simply isn't relevant to you.
Advice from Other Consumers
GoodBed began in 2008 as the first consumer review platform dedicated to mattresses, and today is still by far the largest independent consumer review platform for this product category. So if anyone is in a position to know what mattress shoppers can — and can't — learn from consumer reviews, it's us.
How Useful Are Consumer Reviews for Mattress Shoppers?
For many types of products, consumer reviews are an excellent tool for shoppers. If thousands of people buy the same toaster or wireless router and report their experiences, those reviews can give you a very good sense of whether the product is likely to meet your needs. That’s because most people want the same things from a toaster or a router, and success or failure is fairly universal.
Mattresses, however, are very different. In fact, consumer reviews are much less useful for mattresses than they are for other products, and in many cases can be downright misleading.
Here’s why mattress reviews are different:
1. Mattresses are highly personal. A mattress that is perfect for one person can be terrible for the next. That means the opinion of a random reviewer is unlikely to align with what you personally need — and may even push you in the wrong direction.
2. Reviews rarely include critical sleeper details. In order to know whether someone’s experience is relevant to you, you’d need to know their body type, sleep habits, comfort preferences, health needs, and the like. Most reviewers don’t provide that information, so you’re left guessing whether their opinion applies to your situation — and odds are, it doesn't.
3. Most consumers lack expertise. The average person has only owned a handful of mattresses in their entire life, often with a decade or more between purchases. That limited experience makes it very hard to compare one mattress meaningfully against the wider market. Even basic terms like “firm” or “soft” can be misleading, since people naturally judge them relative to their previous bed rather than against a broader standard.
4. Reviews lack clarity on subjective vs. objective experiences. Consumers often present personal preferences — such as complaining that a bed feels "too soft" or "too firm" — as though they are universal truths. Without context, reviews like these tend to confuse more than they help.
5. Mattress models are numerous and varied. Mattress lines can have dozens of different models, and even a sibling model in the same line can have very different characteristics. This means that an experience on one model doesn't necessarily translate to other models in that line. So mattress reviews need to be very specific about which exact model they are reviewing.
6. Timing is a problem. Many reviews are written just days after delivery, prompted by automated requests from retailers. At that stage, it’s impossible to know how well the mattress will perform over time, or how it will hold up. Durability takes years to evaluate, and characteristics like support and cooling can easily take months.
7. Models change frequently. Mattress companies overhaul or replace their models every few years. When this happens, the reviews found online become irrelevant to the version you can actually buy today.
What CAN Mattress Reviews Tell You?
Despite all these limitations, consumer reviews aren’t entirely useless for mattress shopping. The way they are most useful is in shedding light on a brand’s customer service, warranty support, and reliability (e.g., what issues arise, and how well are they resolved). These experiences tend to be fairly universal, and therefore are applicable and relevant to other shoppers.
Likewise, comments about factual things, like the quality of a mattress’ construction (are the handles sturdy? do the seams come apart?) or universal aspects of the ownership experience (is it easy to unpack and set up? how much did it off-gas?) can certainly be helpful. With such things, look for patterns of the same complaint (the fabric is scratchy, or smelly for example).
Beyond this, in rare cases, a review may also be helpful if the writer provides detailed information about their own body weight, shape, preferred sleep positions, comfort preferences, and other requirements — and if those factors closely match your own. GoodBed is the only mattress review platform whose reviews include holistic information about the reviewer. This way, you can filter the reviews to find ones that are most relevant to your own needs (explore GoodBed user reviews by brand and model).
How Useful Are Mattress Recommendations from Friends and Family?
Your friend or co-worker just loves their mattress and helpfully suggests that you buy the same one. But is your friend is the same size and weight as you? Do they sleep in the same position as you? Do they like the same amount of softness as you? How about memory feel? Bounce? Cushioning depth? Do they have the same needs as you in terms of temperature? What about motion isolation? Edge support? Adjustable base compatibility? And so on. The key thing about mattresses is that they are highly personal. So if the answers to any of these questions is 'no,' then someone else's recommendation – as well-meaning as it is – simply isn't relevant to you.
Friends and family might also recommend a brand of mattress they may have purchased 10 years ago, or you may have heard that such-and-such brand mattresses are “good.” However, products often change, so today’s product from a brand may have little in common with the one they purchased.
If you're determined to seek recommendations from people you know, make sure you fully understand their sleep habits and mattress preferences. Essentially, the questions you need to ask them are the ones we ask in the GoodBed Quiz. If their answers match up very closely with yours, their feedback is useful to you. If not, it will most likely lead you astray.
If they’re a really good friend, they might let you sleep on their mattress for a few nights. This is much better than a recommendation, particularly if the mattress they have is one you're interested in. Of course, sleeping on one mattress won't tell you whether it's the best available option for your needs, but it will at least be a helpful frame of reference.
The Bottom Line
For mattresses, generic star ratings and customer reviews are not a reliable way to choose. Unlike toasters or routers, there is no “wisdom of the crowd” here. Mattress shopping is highly personal, making it very difficult to find relevant customer experiences. And most reviewers lack sufficient context or knowledge to make their reviews useful in the first place.
That said, there are two types of consumer recommendations that can be helpful to you:
- Reviews from mattress owners whose size, shape, and assorted sleep preferences match up with you and your personal requirements
- Experiences that mattress owners have had with a company's customer service and support
So, we recommend starting with a powerful tool like the GoodBed Match Quiz to identify products that are a good match for you, and then reserving the use of consumer reviews as a final confirmatory step before making your purchase.
Advice from Mattress "Experts"
These days, the internet is full of articles written by people who claim to have done the work for you in testing out mattresses. This sounds great, except that the vast majority of these articles are completely untrustworthy, either because the writer doesn't actually have expertise in matching people with the right mattress, or because the writer is actually a salesman that has cleverly disguised themselves as an unbiased reviewer (or both). Many of these sites are even owned by mattress brands.
Trustworthy mattress reviewers
Want to know whether a mattress information source is really reliable? Here are the dead giveaways to spot an untrustworthy mattress reviewer. In general, any kind of generic recommendations from magazines or websites – such as lists of the “Best Mattresses” – are the clearest sign to steer clear of that source.
In our opinion, a trustworthy mattress reviewer must have these two qualities:
- Expertise: A real mattress expert understands the various needs and preferences of many different types of sleepers and is able to assess how well a given mattress will meet a given person’s unique requirements relative to the universe of available options. Simply trying a bunch of mattresses does not make someone an expert in mattresses any more than trying on a bunch of clothes makes someone an expert in fashion.
- Objectivity: Being truly objective means placing the core focus on considering and representing facts, rather than personal feelings or opinions. This doesn’t necessarily mean withholding opinions altogether, but an objective reviewer will always distinguish their opinions (eg, how “comfortable” it is) from the factual attributes of the mattress in order to avoid any possible confusion on the part of the reader.
We believe that a mattress reviewer should be able to clearly demonstrate through the way they present information that they are both expert and objective, and would suggest that you watch or read any of GoodBed's expert in-depth reviews to see what this looks like.
