How to get more Google reviews

A repeatable review-generation system your team will actually run and your customers will not resent. Timing, channels, scripts, the platforms that matter in your sector, and how to handle negatives.

Reviews are simultaneously a ranking input, a click-through input, and the most durable conversion lever in local search. The first is documented: review count and review score feed prominence, one of the three inputs to how local results are ranked.¹ The other two you can watch happen on any results page, where a rating and a review count are visible before anyone reads a word. The leverage is real. The tactical execution is where most businesses lose ground.

Key takeaways

6 points

Timing is the single biggest variable. Ask immediately after value is delivered, not at the start, not weeks later. Google's policy says merchants should not require or pressure users to leave reviews while on the premises, and since April 2026 it also lists staff review quotas and asking for reviews that name a staff member as rating manipulation.
Use a direct review link generated from your GBP dashboard. Removing friction between intent and action is the highest-leverage tactical change.
Know which rules are law and which are Google's. Fake and concealed incentivised reviews are illegal in the UK and the US. Review gating is different: Google prohibits selectively soliciting positive reviews, but the FTC declined to ban the practice outright in its rule, so treat it as a platform rule with real enforcement behind it rather than a matter of law.
Respond to every review, positive and negative, within a short window. Replies are public, are checked by Google before they appear (usually within 10 minutes, occasionally up to 30 days), and influence the next reader.
Specific phrasing in review text matters. Reviews that mention specific services or attributes feed relevance signals; generic praise does not.
Track velocity (new reviews per period), recency (date of most recent review), reply rate, and reply time as ongoing operational metrics, not occasional audits.

Why reviews matter at three different layers

Reviews influence you on three layers at once, and the layers compound. Most businesses understand layers one and three but underestimate how connected they are.

1
Ranking
Layer 1
Review count, velocity, recency, average rating, and increasingly the language inside the review text feed Google's prominence and relevance signals. Reviews mentioning specific services or attributes feed relevance for those queries.
2
Click-through
Layer 2
On the SERP, review density and rating are visible before anyone reads a single word. A 4.7-star listing with several hundred reviews will out-click a higher-rated listing with very few reviews. Volume signals trust.
3
Conversion
Layer 3
Once someone clicks through, recent reviews mentioning specific services or use cases tip the decision to call, visit, or book. Reviews are the testimonial layer that nobody can accuse you of editing.

Reviews are the only marketing asset you do not write yourself. That is exactly why they convert.
The framing that helps

Beyond Google: the second place buyers look

Google is the default and this guide spends most of its time there, for the good reason that it feeds the map, the local pack and the AI answers. It is not the whole picture. Most sectors have a second platform that carries real weight with buyers, and it is usually the one sitting unclaimed with three reviews on it from 2019.

Two things are true almost everywhere. Facebook matters in every sector, because the page often exists whether you maintain it or not and its recommendations surface in search. And the booking platform is a review platform: if customers reserve through something, that something is collecting ratings you may not be reading.

Sector	Claim this one next	Also carries weight	Changes by country
Trades and home services	CheckatradeVetted-trade directories carry more weight here than in any other sector.	TrustpilotFacebookMyBuilderTrustMark	US: Angi, Thumbtack. Australia: hipages. Canada: HomeStars.
Restaurants, cafés and bars	TripadvisorStill the reflex for anyone unfamiliar with an area.	FacebookOpenTableInstagramYelp	TheFork across much of Europe. Zomato in India. Yelp is strongest in the US and Germany.
Hotels and accommodation	Booking.comThe rating here is attached to the transaction, so it is hard to ignore.	TripadvisorExpediaAirbnb	Booking.com dominant across Europe. Expedia group stronger in North America.
Private healthcare and dental	DoctifyClinician-level reviews, which patients weigh separately from the practice.	FacebookTrustpilotWhatClinic	US: Healthgrades, Zocdoc, Vitals. UK: NHS website profiles also carry ratings.
Legal services	TrustpilotWhere firms without a directory presence tend to be checked.	FacebookReviewSolicitors	US: Avvo and Martindale-Hubbell. Check your regulator's rules on testimonials first.
Automotive sales and servicing	AutotraderBuyers research the dealer on the same site they research the car.	TrustpilotFacebookMotor Ombudsman	US: Cars.com, DealerRater, Edmunds. Reviews often sit on the listing, not a profile.
Retail and ecommerce	TrustpilotThe general-purpose trust layer, and the one shown in ads.	FeefoReviews.ioGoogle Seller Ratings	Trusted Shops is the established mark in Germany and much of the EU.
Beauty, salons and wellness	TreatwellThe booking platform is where the rating lives in this sector.	InstagramFacebookFreshaBooksy	Booksy and Yelp carry more weight in the US. Fresha is widely used across markets.
Estate and letting agents	allAgentsSector-specific, and feeds the comparison tables sellers read.	TrustpilotFacebookRightmove	US: Zillow agent reviews. Australia: RateMyAgent.
B2B and professional services	ClutchVerified, interview-backed reviews that buyers treat as due diligence.	TrustpilotLinkedInG2Capterra	G2 and Capterra apply to software anywhere. Clutch skews to agencies and dev shops.

Where buyers in each sector tend to look after Google. Platform prominence shifts, and this is an editorial read rather than a measured ranking, so treat it as a starting point for your own market: search your main service plus your town and see which profiles Google returns above your own site.

Google's review policies, briefly

Before tactics, the rules. Two different sets of them, and conflating the two is how this topic gets discussed badly. Google's Prohibited and restricted content policy² and the wider Maps user-generated content policy³ are platform rules: break them and reviews get removed or a profile gets flagged. Consumer law is separate, narrower, and carries fines. Most advice on this subject blurs them into one word, "banned", which is why so much of it feels overblown.

Within Google's policy

•Ask every customer for a review, by SMS, email, take-home QR or card
•Send a direct review link, or display a QR code in your premises
•Reply publicly to any review, including negative ones
•Flag fake or policy-breaking reviews through the report flow
•Share reviews on your own marketing channels

Against Google's policy

•Selectively soliciting positive reviews, or discouraging negative ones
•Requiring or pressuring customers to review while still on the premises
•Asking staff to hit review quotas, or to solicit reviews naming an employee
•Offering incentives of any kind in exchange for a review
•Soliciting content that does not represent a genuine experience

Actually illegal

•Writing, buying, commissioning or selling fake reviews
•Incentivised reviews where the incentive is concealed
•In the UK, fines up to £300,000 or 10% of global turnover
•In the US, civil penalties per violation under the FTC rule

The middle column is the one worth understanding properly. Those are Google's rules for Google's platform, enforced by taking reviews down rather than by a regulator. That does not make them optional, because losing a year of reviews in a sweep is a real business event. It does mean the honest word is "against policy", not "illegal".

Tightened in 2026: no pressure on premises, no staff quotas

Google's wording is that when soliciting reviews, merchants "should not require or pressure users to leave ratings or write reviews while on the premises".² Read that carefully, because the rule is about requiring and pressuring, not about the equipment. A kiosk or shared tablet is where pressure tends to happen, particularly with a staff member waiting beside it, which is why it attracts attention. Handing someone a tablet is not itself named in the policy. The practical read, and the one worth building a process on: anything the customer completes under observation before they can leave is exposed, anything they do later on their own phone is not.

Inviting a customer to review later, by SMS, email, a receipt link or a QR code they scan themselves, is clearly fine, and a QR code on display in your store is one of the suggested ways to share the link.⁴ In April 2026 Google added two items to the rating manipulation list: merchants requesting that staff solicit a certain number of reviews, and requesting that staff solicit reviews containing specific content, including content that identifies a staff member.² Check the current wording before you redesign an ask flow around it, because this is the part of the policy Google has revised most often.

Review gating: what the sources actually say

Gating means sending a feedback form first, then routing predicted-happy customers to Google and unhappy ones to a private channel. It is worth being precise here, because it is routinely described in stronger terms than the source documents support, and business owners can tell when they are being told off rather than informed.

Google. The policy never uses the word "gating". What it lists under rating manipulation is "discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers".² A flow that decides who gets the review link based on predicted sentiment is selective solicitation on any reading, so gating does breach the policy. The consequence is reviews removed and a profile flagged, not a fine.

The US. The FTC was asked this directly and chose not to ban it. Its own guidance poses the question of whether a business can ask for reviews only from customers it thinks are happy, and answers that the rule contains no specific prohibition against the conduct, while adding that it could still violate the FTC Act.⁵ That is a regulator declining to draw a bright line, and anyone telling you the FTC banned gating has not read it.

The UK. The DMCC Act's banned practices are fake reviews and concealed incentivised reviews.⁶ Gating is not named among them. The sharper legal exposure is on the display side: suppressing genuine negative reviews or selectively presenting positive ones can mislead under the CMA's guidance, and suppression is among the practices the CMA opened investigations into in March 2026.⁷

Where the line actually sits

One test does most of the work: is the review invitation conditional on what you think the customer will say? If it is, that is gating. If it is not, you have considerably more room than the usual advice suggests.

Fine, and widely assumed not to be:

Running a satisfaction survey, provided everyone gets the review invitation regardless of how they scored it.
Having a service-recovery process for unhappy customers, provided you are not withholding the review ask from them while you run it.
Choosing your moment. Asking when someone has just had a good outcome is timing, not filtering, because nobody is being excluded.
Reminding the people who have not responded yet.
Displaying a QR code in your premises, which is listed as a way to share your review link.⁴

Genuinely grey, and worth admitting: a member of staff asking for a review in person because the customer has just said how pleased they are. That is technically selective, it is what every good business does, and it is not what enforcement is aimed at. The policy targets systematic filtering built into a tool, not judgement exercised in a conversation. The line is not as crisp as most advice pretends, and you should know that rather than be told a rule you can see people breaking every day without consequence.

The business case is the stronger argument anyway. The customers a gate filters out are the ones whose reviews would have given your rating credible variance. An unbroken wall of five stars reads as bought, and the three-star reviews you avoided are the ones telling you what is actually broken.

The law, by where you operate

Google's policy is the same everywhere. The law is not, and this is the part most review advice skips because it was written for one market. The consistent thread across every jurisdiction below is that fake reviews are illegal. Almost everything else varies, sometimes in ways that reverse the advice.

	What the law actually reaches Beyond fake reviews, which are banned everywhere here	Exposure Who enforces, and how hard	The part that surprises people Where it diverges from the received wisdom
United Kingdom	Fake reviews and concealed incentivised reviews are banned practices under the DMCC Act, in force since 6 April 2025⁶⁷	CMA can fine up to £300,000 or 10% of global turnover, and decide it directly without going to court	Suppressing genuine negative reviews is squarely in scope, and was among the practices the CMA opened investigations into in March 2026
European Union	Annex I of the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive bans submitting or commissioning false reviews, and claiming reviews come from real purchasers without checking⁸	Set nationally, and several member states allow turnover-based fines	The verification duty. If you state reviews are from genuine customers, you must take "reasonable and proportionate steps" to confirm that, rather than simply assert it
United States	Creating, buying or selling fake reviews, insider reviews without disclosure, and suppressing reviews through threats or false accusations⁹	FTC civil penalties, assessed per violation	The FTC declined to ban asking only your happy customers. Its rule contains no specific prohibition, though it notes the practice could still breach the FTC Act⁵
Australia	Fake or misleading reviews, undisclosed connections, and suppressing or editing genuine negative reviews¹⁰	Up to A$50m for companies, or three times the benefit, or 30% of adjusted turnover	Incentives are permitted, if the incentive applies whether the review is positive or negative and is clearly disclosed. That is more permissive than Google's policy, which still bans them¹¹
Canada	Astroturfing under the Competition Act's deceptive marketing provisions, including employees reviewing without disclosing the connection¹²	Civil penalties up to C$10m for a corporation's first offence and C$15m after	The test is the undisclosed material connection, not the review itself. A genuine employee review becomes a problem when the relationship is hidden
United Arab Emirates	A different shape entirely. Online defamation and publishing false information are criminal offences under the cybercrime decree-law¹³	Detention and substantial fines, aimed at whoever published the content	The risk points at the reviewer. A customer posting a damaging false review can face criminal liability, which changes how disputes are handled locally. It does not license manufacturing your own reviews

A summary for orientation, not legal advice, and deliberately limited to jurisdictions with a published position we could read directly. Elsewhere, including Brazil, India and Singapore, reviews are generally caught by broader misleading-advertising and consumer-protection rules rather than review-specific law. Check locally before building a process on any of it.

The ask: timing is the variable that matters most

The single most important thing about review asks is when you make them. The right moment is immediately after the customer experiences the value of what they bought. Not at the start. Not weeks later. The window of peak willingness is short, often under a few hours.

Ask at this moment

•Restaurant / hospitality: by SMS within a few hours of the visit (not at the table or till)
•Retail (in-store): a take-home QR on the printed receipt, scanned after they leave
•Retail (online): a few days after delivery, when the customer has had time to use the product
•Trades and home services: by SMS shortly after the job is completed
•Professional services: at a milestone (case closed, accounts filed, project delivered)
•Healthcare: a few days after the appointment, by SMS, with a clear opt-out
•Beauty and wellness: at the end of the appointment, in person or by SMS shortly after

Avoid asking at these moments

•Before the customer has experienced any value (during onboarding)
•Weeks after the moment of peak satisfaction
•After a complaint or service failure
•When the customer is rushed or distracted
•Bundled into a long survey or NPS form
•From an unrecognisable sender or anonymous tool

Use a direct review link, not "search for us on Google"

Generate a direct review link from your GBP dashboard.¹¹⁴ The format is a short URL (currently https://g.page/r/...) that opens straight to the leave-a-review form on the customer's device. Use it everywhere:

On printed receipts, with a QR code
In post-service SMS messages
In post-purchase email confirmations
On a physical card handed over at the end of service
As a take-home QR code on a receipt or card (not a shared on-counter device the customer reviews on)
In email signatures of customer-facing team members
On the thank-you page after online booking or checkout
On invoices for B2B services
Inside any customer portal or order-tracking interface

Channels: SMS, email, in-person, passive

Different channels work at different points in the customer journey. There is no universal "best" channel. There is the channel that fits when the moment of peak satisfaction occurs.

SMS

•Highest conversion of any channel for most sectors
•Best when timed within a few hours of value delivery
•Costs are predictable: per-message rates from your SMS provider
•Subject to consent rules: PECR plus UK GDPR (soft opt-in for existing customers)
•Best for: hospitality, beauty, healthcare, trades, retail with phone numbers

•Lower per-send conversion but scales to higher volume
•Best for post-purchase or post-service automated sequences
•Subject to PECR and UK GDPR (soft opt-in applies for existing customers receiving similar communications)
•Easier to template and personalise than SMS at scale
•Best for: e-commerce, professional services, anywhere you have email but not phone

QR code / card

•Hand over a QR card or receipt, or display a QR code, for customers to scan on their own phone
•Stays clear of Google's rule against pressuring customers to review on your premises or on a shared device
•Free to implement (printed QR codes, handover cards, receipts)
•Requires staff training on handing it over without pressing for the review there and then
•Best for: hospitality, retail, beauty, in-person trades

Passive (receipts, invoices, footers)

•Lowest conversion, but compounds with no ongoing effort once set up
•Useful as a backstop alongside active channels
•Easy to add to existing receipt or invoice templates
•Worth doing even if conversion is small per receipt
•Best as: complement to SMS or email, not a replacement

For most businesses, the right answer is SMS at the moment of peak satisfaction, plus a QR code for in-person reinforcement, plus email for the customers you do not have a phone number for. Do not pick one. Use the channel appropriate to the customer journey.

What to write in the ask

Short. Specific. Polite. Unambiguous about what you are asking for. A template that works:

Hi [name], thanks for choosing [business] today. If we did a good job, would you mind leaving a quick Google review? It really helps us. Here is the link: [direct link]. Thank you!

Notes on this template:

The conditional "if we did a good job" is sometimes flagged as gating-adjacent. In the strict reading of Google's policy it is not gating (you are still sending the same link to everyone) but a more neutral framing avoids ambiguity: "Would you mind sharing your experience as a Google review?"
Personalisation matters. The customer's name and a reference to the specific service ("thanks for booking your service today") meaningfully lifts response rate over generic templates.
Length should be short. Two to three lines max for SMS, slightly longer for email but not by much.
Do not condition the ask on rating. Ask everyone, and trust the timing.

Tactics most businesses leave on the table

The basics above get you most of the way. These are the ones that separate a system producing a trickle from one producing a steady flow, and none of them require bending a rule.

1
Send exactly one reminder
Biggest single gain
Most businesses ask once and stop. A single short follow-up to the people who have not responded, three to five days later, recovers a meaningful share of them, because the first message arrived while they were driving. Two asks is a reminder. Three is harassment, and it is the point where goodwill starts working against you.
2
Let them choose the platform
Removes the real blocker
"Google or Facebook, whichever you already use" converts better than insisting on Google, because the most common silent failure is a customer who is not signed in to the account you sent them to. It also spreads your footprint across the platforms that matter in your sector. Everyone gets the same choice, so it is not selective in any sense that matters.
3
Ask after you have put something right
Counterintuitive, and it works
The moment a complaint is resolved well is often peak goodwill, higher than a job that simply went to plan. Reviews from these customers tend to be the most specific and the most persuasive, because they describe a problem and how you handled it. You are asking everyone anyway, so this is not filtering. It is remembering to include the people most businesses quietly skip.
4
Reply fast to negatives, because reviews can be edited
Recovers the damage
A reviewer can update what they wrote. A fast, non-defensive reply that fixes the underlying problem sometimes turns a one-star into a four-star, and often ends with the reviewer adding an update rather than changing the score. What you cannot do is make the fix conditional on the review changing. Resolve it because it needs resolving, publicly note that you have, and leave the rest alone.
5
Make it a job-completion step, not a campaign
Why it lasts
The ask belongs on the job sheet, the discharge checklist or the checkout script, owned by whoever finished the work. Campaigns get launched, produce a spike and quietly stop. Processes survive staff turnover and a busy month, which is the only way review velocity stays steady.
6
Ask for specifics with a question, not a script
Improves what you get
"What did we sort out for you?" produces service-specific language that feeds relevance. "Please mention the boiler repair and give us five stars" is scripting content, which breaches policy and reads as fake to the next customer. The distinction is simple: a question invites, a script dictates.
7
Invite a photo
Underrated
Reviews with photos draw more attention and carry more credibility, particularly in trades, hospitality and anything with a visible result. Asking someone to add a picture of the finished work is a format request, not a content instruction, so it sits comfortably inside the rules.
8
Smooth the velocity when restarting
Avoids the own goal
If you are reviving a neglected profile, work through the backlog over several weeks rather than emailing four hundred past customers on a Tuesday. A sudden cluster from dormant accounts is exactly the pattern filters are built to catch, and losing the lot to a sweep is a worse outcome than a slower build.

Reply to every review, positive and negative

Reply to every review within a short window. Google both expects owners to reply and treats the reply surface as part of the profile you maintain,¹⁴ and replies are public. They influence the next reader more than people expect: a thoughtful, specific reply to a one-star review reassures a prospect more than ten generic positive reviews would. Google checks every owner reply before it goes live. Most clear within about 10 minutes, some take up to 30 days, and a reply that is not approved has to be edited and resubmitted,¹⁴ so check the public listing to confirm your reply actually appeared (our post on missing review replies covers why).

For positive reviews, keep replies short and specific, mentioning the service or attribute the reviewer named. For negative reviews, follow this structure.

1
Read it twice before responding
The instinct to defend produces a worse reply than the one you would write after stepping away for an hour. For particularly cutting reviews, sleep on the response. The 48-hour window has room for that.
2
Acknowledge the specific complaint
Show that you read what they wrote. Avoid generic openers like "we are sorry for your experience". Quote the specific issue back: "I am sorry the repair took two visits. Here is what should have happened."
3
Apologise sincerely, even if you disagree
Save the disagreement for the private channel. The public reply acknowledges that the customer's experience was real to them. You are writing for the next reader as much as for the original reviewer.
4
Briefly explain what you will do differently
One sentence. Specific enough to be credible: "We have changed how we schedule follow-up visits to prevent this from happening again." Avoid long paragraphs explaining why it was not really your fault.
5
Offer a private channel to resolve it
"I would like to put this right. Please get in touch with us directly using the contact details on our profile." The public review thread should never become a public argument. Move the conversation off-stage as soon as possible.

Fake or unfair reviews

Eventually you will get a review that is clearly not from a real customer. Possibly a malicious actor, possibly someone confusing you with another business, possibly someone with a personal grievance unrelated to the service. Options, in order of preference:

Reply publicly first

•State you have no record of them as a customer
•Invite them to contact you directly to clarify
•Stay polite and factual; the next reader is watching
•Sometimes the reviewer realises and removes it themselves

Then flag for removal

•Use the GBP report flow for the specific review
•Valid reasons under Google's policies: spam, off-topic, conflict of interest, hate speech, contains personal information
•Not valid: 'I disagree with their opinion'
•Evaluation typically takes several days; if no violation is found you get one appeal, for up to 10 reviews, in the Reviews Management Tool

Then drown them out

•Get more genuine reviews coming in
•One unfair review surrounded by many genuine recent ones reads as the outlier it is
•Volume is your defence against unfair singletons
•This is the long-term strategy, not the short-term one

Operational metrics worth tracking

Reviews are an ongoing operation, not a one-off audit. Five metrics worth tracking continuously:

1
Review velocity
Most important
New reviews per week or per month, segmented by location if you have multiple. Should grow or hold steady. A sudden drop usually means someone changed the asking process or stopped doing it.
2
Average rating
Important
Hold above 4.5 in most sectors. Below that, the reviews are usually accurate and the bottleneck is operations, not asks.
3
Asks-to-reviews conversion
Operational
By channel and by team member where possible. Lets you find which moments and which staff produce conversion, and replicate what works.
4
Reply rate and reply time
Operational
Aim for 100% reply rate within 48 hours. Tracking it is what makes it actually happen.
5
Sentiment in review text
Strategic
Which words and phrases keep recurring? They tell you what your customers actually value, which feeds your marketing copy, your positioning, and increasingly your AI search visibility (review phrasing is what AI assistants extract).

Our review monitoring tool tracks new reviews, rating trends and sentiment for every location you track: Google on every plan, plus Trustpilot and Tripadvisor on Pro and above. Connect your Google Business Profile and the agent drafts replies you can post from the Reply Inbox, with Google's moderation status shown on each one. The point is not the dashboard. The point is making sure no review goes unanswered.

Multi-location and franchise considerations

At one location you reply to reviews when you see them. At ten locations or more you need a process. The patterns that work:

One inbox per location, owned by the location manager or a designated reviewer (centralised reply-everything-from-one-person breaks down past about 8 locations)
Reply SLA: 48 hours maximum, ideally same day, made part of the location manager's KPIs
Reply templates for common positive and negative scenarios that location managers personalise (templates as a starting point, not the final reply)
Escalation rules: anything below 3 stars or mentioning legal or safety issues goes to head office
Monthly review velocity reporting per location to spot ones falling behind early
Brand voice document the location manager references when replying
A central review-monitoring tool that surfaces unanswered reviews across the portfolio

See the multi-location guide for the full operational architecture.

Common mistakes

The ask-flow checklist

Run through this once. If any line is "no", that is where the leak is.

Direct GBP review link generated and saved as a short URL
QR code printed on receipts or visible at point of sale
Post-service SMS template written and saved (and consent logic documented)
Post-purchase email template written and scheduled into the order flow
Team trained on when and how to ask, by role and by moment
Review-reply rota or assigned owner with 48-hour SLA
Negative-review escalation policy (who handles it, when it goes to leadership)
Reply templates documented for common positive and negative scenarios
Monthly review velocity reported to leadership or to the location managers if multi-site
Annual review of average rating, sentiment trends, and reply quality

Where to go next

Keep reading

Google Business Profile: optimisation guideReviews land on your GBP. Make sure the rest of the listing is doing its job too.Read NAP consistency & local citationsReviews compound on a clean foundation. Citations are that foundation.Read Ranking on Google MapsReviews are a heavy prominence signal. Here is how it interacts with the others.Read AI search visibility (GEO)Review sentiment and specific phrasing is what AI assistants extract when picking businesses to recommend.Read

References

Every claim above that rests on someone else's work is marked inline and listed here, with a link to the original where we link out. Links last checked 22 Sept 2026.

1.Google. Tips to improve your local ranking on Google. Lists review count and score among the things that feed prominence. Checked 21 Aug 2026.
2.Google. Prohibited and restricted content: reviews. The rating manipulation rules. Note the wording: Google prohibits selectively soliciting positive reviews and discouraging negative ones, and never uses the term "review gating". Checked 20 Aug 2026.
3.Google. Maps user-generated content policy. The umbrella policy page that links to the detailed rules on prohibited and restricted content. Checked 21 Aug 2026.
4.Google. Create a Google link or QR code to request reviews. Where the review link and QR code come from, and where Google suggests using them. Checked 16 Sept 2026.
5.US Federal Trade Commission. The Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule: questions and answers. The FTC's own reading, including its answer on whether a business may ask for reviews only from customers it believes are happy: the rule contains no specific prohibition, though the conduct could still violate the FTC Act. Checked 21 Aug 2026.
6.UK Parliament (2024). Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. Makes fake and concealed incentivised reviews a banned practice in the UK. Checked 21 Aug 2026.
7.UK Competition and Markets Authority (2025). Fake reviews: guidance for businesses (CMA208) Checked 21 Aug 2026.
8.European Union (2022). Unfair Commercial Practices Directive 2005/29/EC, consolidated text as applicable from 28 May 2022. Annex I points 23b and 23c, added by the Omnibus Directive 2019/2161, list fake reviews and unverified authenticity claims among the practices unfair in all circumstances. Checked 22 Sept 2026.
9.US Federal Trade Commission (August 2024). Final rule banning fake reviews and testimonials. 16 CFR Part 465. Carries civil penalties, unlike a platform policy. Checked 21 Aug 2026.
10.Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. Managing online reviews. The ACCC's position, including that incentives are permitted where they apply regardless of whether the review is positive or negative and are clearly disclosed. Checked 22 Sept 2026.
11.Google. Tips to get more reviews. Google's tips for asking, including its ban on incentives. Checked 21 Aug 2026.
12.Competition Bureau Canada. Deceptive Marketing Practices Digest, Volume 1. Defines astroturfing and sets out the Bureau's position on undisclosed material connections between reviewers and advertisers. Checked 22 Sept 2026.
13.United Arab Emirates (2021). Federal Decree-Law No. 34 of 2021 on Countering Rumours and Cybercrimes. Criminalises online defamation and publishing false information. Relevant because it points the legal risk at the reviewer rather than only at the business. Checked 22 Sept 2026.
14.Google. Manage customer reviews Checked 21 Aug 2026.
15.Google. Report inappropriate reviews on your Business Profile. The report flow, and the grounds Google will actually act on. Checked 21 Aug 2026.