Review gating

In more detail

The line is not "asking for reviews", it is "asking selectively". Inviting every customer to leave a review, using the same process regardless of how the visit or order went, is the legitimate, policy-compliant practice: some of those customers will leave negative reviews, and that is the point, an honest review base. Gating happens when a sentiment question comes first ("were you happy with your visit? Yes / No") and only the "yes" answers get routed to a public review link, while "no" answers are quietly diverted to a private inbox. The FTC's 2024 Rule on Consumer Reviews and Testimonials formally bars this: a business cannot misrepresent that the reviews on display represent a fair sample when it has been filtering out the negative ones before they are written. Google's and Trustpilot's own guidelines for businesses independently prohibit the same behaviour and will remove reviews, downrank listings or suspend profiles over it.

In a sentence

“A restaurant that texts every table the same review-request link, win or lose, is asking cleanly. A restaurant that only sends that link to tables who first answered "yes, everything was great" on a private survey is gating.”

Not the same as

• Universal review invitations

  Asking every customer, regardless of expected sentiment, through the same channel and process, is the compliant baseline; nothing here restricts asking for reviews itself.

• Private feedback channels

  Offering an additional private way to reach support (a "if anything wasn't right, reply here instead") is fine on its own; it becomes gating only when it replaces the public review invitation for customers pre-screened as unhappy.

Read more on this

• Strategy

  How to Get More Google Reviews (Without Breaking Google's Rules)

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  What Great Reviews Look Like for Restaurants, Salons and Local Service Businesses

  Local reviews run on a different engine than ecommerce reviews: Google Business Profile decides who gets found, and the reviews that move rankings name a dish, a stylist, a fix, not just "great service". The anatomy, and how to prompt for it.

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  FTC Endorsement Guidelines for Influencer and UGC Content

  The 2023 updates expanded brand liability. Disclosure rules, labelling reposted UGC, the material-connection definition, and the enforcement actions to learn from.

External reference