How do you get more Google reviews?

The review link and where to put it

Every verified Business Profile has a short link that opens the review form directly, with the star selector already on screen. Google generates it inside the profile. Sending someone to search for you instead adds three steps, and most people drop out inside those three steps.

Put the link where the customer already is at the moment the work finishes:

• On the invoice or the receipt, printed and emailed.
• In the message that confirms the job is complete or the order has shipped.
• On a card handed over at the end of the visit, with a QR code that opens the same link.
• In the email signature of the person the customer actually dealt with.

One place it does not belong is a page on your own site that asks people how it went before it shows them the link. That is review gating, and it is covered below.

Timing the ask

Ask at the point of completed value: when the work is finished, when the problem is solved, when the thing has been used at least once. Ask a customer before they have experienced the outcome and you are asking about the sales process. Ask three weeks later and the detail that made the review worth reading is gone.

The other half of timing is consistency. A business that asks every customer, every time, will build review volume from ordinary operations. A business that asks in bursts when the rating dips builds a spiky arrival pattern, which is one of the patterns automated systems read as inauthentic.

Writing the review request

Four things belong in the request and nothing else: who is asking, what it is about, the link, and how long it takes. Anything longer reads as marketing and gets skipped.

Do not tell people what to say. A set of reviews that all use your suggested phrases reads exactly like a set of reviews that all came from the same template, to a reader and to a filter. Do not ask for five stars either. Asking for the rating rather than the review is the small step that turns a legitimate request into a manipulated sample.

Review gating: asking everyone, not only the happy ones

Gating is a violation for a straightforward reason: it manufactures a rating that does not describe the customer base. Google's contribution policies prohibit soliciting reviews selectively in this way, and the same behaviour sits inside the conduct the Federal Trade Commission's review rule addresses when the effect is to suppress negative reviews. Google's prohibited and restricted content policies for reviews is the platform half of that.

The compliant version of the same instinct is to ask everyone, and to route service recovery separately. Send the review request to every customer. Send a private follow-up asking how it went to every customer as well, and act on the answers. What you may not do is use the second one to decide who gets the first.

What is not allowed, and the rule each shortcut breaks

Shortcut	Why it is a violation
Offering a discount, a draw entry, or a free item for a review	Platform policy prohibits incentivised reviews, and the federal rule reaches undisclosed incentives that produce distorted reviews
Paying a service to post reviews	The reviews describe experiences that never happened, which is fake content under policy and a fabricated review under the rule
Staff, family or friends posting reviews	Undisclosed connection to the business; a misrepresentation under policy
Showing the review link only to satisfied customers	Review gating; a selective solicitation that misstates the customer base
Sending review requests to a bought or scraped list	The recipients are not customers, so the reviews cannot describe a real experience
Offering anything in exchange for changing or removing a bad review	Buying a change in the review record, which is the same conduct as buying the review
Reviewing a competitor to lower their average	Prohibited content posted to manipulate a rating

The federal layer underneath every platform policy on this page: the Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, a final rule by the Federal Trade Commission published 22 August 2024 at 16 CFR Part 465. Screenshot taken 19 August 2026.

The rule is written at businesses rather than at platforms, which is what makes it different from a policy violation: the exposure lands on the company that benefited. The FTC's own Q and A on the Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule is the plain language version, and it is short enough to read before your next campaign goes out.

What volume actually moves

Review count and review score are among the inputs Google names in Google's guidance on local ranking factors, alongside relevance, distance and prominence. So the effect of a steady stream of legitimate reviews is not only the visible average. It is also the profile's standing in local results.

The second effect is on how a single bad review reads. Inside a handful of reviews, a one star account is the profile. Inside several hundred, it is one person's afternoon. Nothing dilutes a harsh review as reliably as ordinary customers describing ordinary service, and no removal process reaches the review that dilution handles for free.

When the review request stops working

Review generation fails for three reasons, and only one of them is about the ask. The first is that nobody owns it, so it happens in bursts. The second is that the link is buried, so the customer would have to go looking. The third is that the request goes out days after the work, from an address the customer does not recognise.

If those are fixed and the reviews still are not arriving, the honest possibility is that the experience is not producing them. Review volume is an operational metric before it is a marketing one, and reading the last twenty reviews as a group tells you more about that than any tool will. Working out which of the three is actually in play is part of what a reputation audit looks at.