How to get Google reviews without breaking Google's rules

Asking customers for reviews is allowed and encouraged. Google publishes its own tips for getting more of them. Four things around the asking are not allowed, and all four are common.

The rule underneath all of them is one sentence: "Reviews and other user contributions to Google Maps must reflect a genuine experience." Everything below is that sentence applied.

Paying for them, in any form

Google's wording covers more than cash: "Reviews or ratings that have been paid for, directly or in kind." In kind means the discount, the free filter, the entry into a draw. It is banned whether or not you ask for five stars, and whether or not the customer would have left a good review anyway.

Reviews from people who were not customers

Google prohibits "Content that is not based on a real experience." A friend who has seen your work but never hired you is not a customer. Neither is the contact who swaps reviews with you, and swapped reviews are easy for Google to spot because the two profiles point at each other.

Reviews from your own side

A review from inside the business is a conflict of interest, and Google says that "may include current or former employment" counts. Your installer's review of your company is a conflict whether he left last year or starts on Monday.

Pushing back on bad ones

Threatening a reviewer, or getting a negative review pulled by claiming something about them you cannot support, is its own breach. There is a US rule on this as well, further down.

Here is the sentence worth reading twice. Among the things a merchant must not do, Google's prohibited content policy lists:

"Discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers."

That is review gating, and it is written into the policy rather than left to interpretation. The common versions all land on the wrong side of it:

• Sending the review link only to jobs that went well.
• A survey that asks "how did we do" first, and only shows the Google link to the ones who answer positively.
• Software that routes happy customers to Google and unhappy ones to a private feedback form.
• Telling the engineer to ask "if they seem pleased".

The last one is the one nobody thinks of as a system, and it is the most common of the four. A rule in somebody's head is still a rule.

What to do instead

Ask everyone, the same way, every time. A trade doing honest work gets a rating that holds up, and the occasional three-star review does less damage than owners expect. A profile with forty five-star reviews and nothing else reads as bought, to a customer as much as to Google.

Google gives every profile a direct review link and a QR code. Most trades never find it and send people hunting through Maps instead, which is where half of them give up.

1. Open your Business Profile at business.google.com on a computer.
2. Select Read Reviews, then Get more reviews.
3. Copy the link, or save the QR code image to print.
4. Google also offers to send the request straight out by email, WhatsApp or a Facebook post.

One thing to know before you try it on site: "Currently, reviews QR codes can only be generated on a computer browser, not on mobile devices." Make it on a computer, then print it.

Where to put it

The link belongs where the job ends, not in a newsletter. On the invoice, in the message that confirms the work is done, on a card left in the consumer unit or the boiler cupboard, on the back of the van. The QR code on a laminated card in the engineer's bag costs nothing and outperforms every email campaign we have seen.

What to say

Short, and without steering. "If you have a minute, a review helps other people in the area find us" works. "We'd love five stars" does not, because it asks for a rating rather than an experience, and because it puts the request on the wrong side of the FTC rule below.

Say it out loud as well as sending it. A person who has been asked face to face and then gets the link an hour later responds far more often than one who only gets the link.

This is the part that actually moves the number, and it is ours rather than Google's. Reviews follow relief, and relief has a short half-life. The same request sent three days later gets a fraction of the response.

The pattern holds across all of them: ask while the customer can still see the problem you solved. Once the room is tidy and the heating just works, the job stops feeling like a favour and becomes something they paid for.

Google can remove a review or restrict a profile. The Federal Trade Commission can fine you. Its rule on consumer reviews has applied since 21 October 2024, and the FTC says it "authorizes courts to impose civil penalties for knowing violations".

Three parts matter to a local trade.

Incentives are not banned outright, but the condition is

The FTC's test is whether the reward depends on what the review says: incentives are acceptable "as long as there isn't an express or implied requirement that the reviews have to express a particular sentiment". So "leave a review and get a discount" is a different thing in law from "leave a good review and get a discount".

That distinction does not help you on Google, though. Google bans the incentive itself, with no sentiment test. If your customers are leaving reviews on Google, the stricter of the two rules is the one you live by, and the answer is simply not to offer anything.

Family and staff must say who they are

Where a relative reviews the business, the FTC expects them to "clearly and conspicuously disclose their relationship to your business". Read alongside Google's conflict-of-interest rule, the honest answer for a small firm is that family and staff reviews are not worth the trouble on either side.

You cannot threaten your way out of a bad review

An "unfounded or groundless legal threat" used to stop a review or get it removed is prohibited. Replying publicly and contacting the customer to put the job right are both fine, and both work better.

The FTC publishes its own questions and answers on the rule, written for businesses rather than lawyers.

Reply to all of them, and reply as the person who owns the business. Google's guidance is short and two lines of it are worth holding to.

Do not sell in a reply: Google says to "avoid using your response to offer deals or promotions". And never "share a reviewer's private information or engage in personal attacks", which in practice means not naming the job, the address or what the customer owed you, however tempting that is when the review is unfair.

The one that is wrong about the facts

Answer it once, plainly, for the next reader rather than for the reviewer. Say what happened, say what you offered, stop. Nobody reading a profile expects a perfect record. What they are reading is how the owner behaves when something goes wrong, and a calm two-line reply under a one-star review sells better than the five stars above it.

If a review genuinely breaks Google's policy, report it and leave it at that. Getting reviews removed, and the slower work of earning enough good ones that one bad one stops mattering, is most of what our reputation work actually is.

Get the review link out of your profile, put the QR code in the van, and ask every customer at the moment the job is done. Offer nothing, steer nobody, and reply to all of them. That is the whole method, and the only hard part is doing it on the jobs that went badly as well.