What are the rules on asking customers for Google reviews?

If you want to know how to ask customers for Google reviews under UK law, the answer is short: ask everybody, the same way, every time, and never offer them anything for it. Asking is allowed and Google says so explicitly. Offering a discount, a prize draw or a free anything in exchange is prohibited by Google and is named in UK legislation. Screening out the customers you think are unhappy sits in murkier territory and is still not worth doing.

I read Google's own policy and the relevant Act on 19 August 2026, because this is one of those subjects where everyone repeats each other and almost nobody cites anything.

Am I allowed to ask for reviews at all?

Yes, and this needs saying because a surprising number of trades think it is somehow cheeky.

Google's own policy explicitly permits a business to solicit or encourage genuine reviews, provided you are not offering incentives to do so and not attempting to influence the rating or the contents of the review.

So a text after a finished job saying you would appreciate an honest review is not only allowed, it is the single most valuable thing most trades are not doing.

What is actually banned?

Three things, and the first is the one being sold to trades right now as a clever growth tactic.

Offering anything in exchange. Google's prohibited content list covers reviews posted because of an incentive from the business, naming payment, discounts and free goods or services. Its rules for businesses prohibit offering incentives in exchange for posting a review, or for revising or removing a negative one.

Pressuring people on the premises. Google says merchants should not require or pressure users to leave ratings or write reviews while on the premises. So standing over somebody with a tablet while they type is out.

Telling them what to say. Google says merchants should not request that specific content be included. Which also means asking for a particular rating is asking for the wrong thing. Ask for an honest review, not a good one.

What does UK law say, separately from Google?

This is the part that has actual legal teeth, and it changed more recently than most people realise.

The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 lists banned commercial practices in Schedule 20. Paragraph 13 came into force on 6 April 2025 and it covers reviews. In the Act's own words it bans submitting, or commissioning somebody to submit or write, a fake consumer review or a consumer review that conceals the fact it has been incentivised.

It also bans publishing consumer reviews in a misleading way, and it gives examples of what that means: failing to publish, or removing from publication, negative reviews while publishing positive ones, or giving greater prominence to positive reviews over negative ones.

So the prize draw idea is not just against a platform's terms. A review obtained by an incentive that is not disclosed is named in an Act of Parliament.

Is review gating illegal?

Here is where I have to be careful, because our own notes on this used to be more confident than the source justified and had to be corrected.

Review gating means asking people how their experience was first, then only sending the happy ones to Google.

Google's reviews policy does not address gating. Do not tell anybody it does. What Google's policy says is that reviews must reflect genuine experiences.

The Act addresses the publishing side, not the asking side. Filtering which reviews you show on your own website is named directly: that is the "misleading way" example, word for word. Choosing which customers you ask, where every review then goes to Google unfiltered, is not named in those words, and whether a particular arrangement is caught turns on the facts.

So the honest position, which is also the simple one: do not gate. Not because a specific line forbids the asking, but because the safe version is easier to run and the risky version buys you nothing you cannot get honestly.

The rule that keeps you safe, in one line

Ask everybody, the same way, every time.

Put the asking into the end of the job rather than into a campaign. If it happens automatically when the job is marked finished, nobody is choosing who gets asked, which means nobody can accuse you of choosing.

And give unhappy customers somewhere else to go. The most valuable sentence in any review request is the one offering them a reply address if something was not right. Somebody annoyed who is handed only a review link leaves a public complaint. Somebody handed a way to reply usually just tells you, and then you can fix it.

That is not gating. You are asking everybody. You are also offering the unhappy ones a faster route to getting the problem solved, which is a different thing and a better one.

What about the software that promises to boost your ratings?

Be careful with anything that promises to lift your rating rather than to collect honest opinions.

We built our own review asker so that it refuses to send any message containing a discount, a voucher, a prize draw, a raffle, or a request for a particular rating. It is a check in the code with a test that fails the build if somebody removes it, not a line in a policy document. The reason it works that way is that the penalty for getting this wrong lands on the tradesman's Google listing, not on the supplier who wrote the message.

If a supplier is offering you a review campaign with a prize attached, they have either not read Google's policy or they have decided it is your problem. Either way you now know enough to ask them about it.

Where to stop

If you have already run an incentivised review campaign, or somebody has left a review you believe is fake, that is worth proper advice rather than a blog post. The Competition and Markets Authority enforces the Act and the position on historic reviews is not something to work out from an article.

This is a map of the traps with the source for each, not legal advice.

The short version

Ask everybody. Ask the same way every time. Ask for an honest review rather than a good one. Never offer anything. Give unhappy customers a reply address instead of a review link.

Do that and you will collect more reviews than most of your competition, and none of them will be a problem later.

If you want the asking built into the job rather than remembered on a Friday, that is part of what we build. The AI implementation page explains it.

Sources, both read 19 August 2026: Google's prohibited and restricted content policy for Business Profiles, and the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, Schedule 20, paragraph 13.