How to get more Google reviews without breaking the law

Reviews matter more than most local businesses realise, and recency matters more than volume. Forty reviews from this year beat two hundred from 2022, because Google reads recent activity as evidence you are still trading and still good.

The problem is that the obvious ways to get reviews quickly are now the illegal ones. Here is the line, and a system that stays on the right side of it.

What changed

The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 made fake reviews explicitly unlawful in the UK. Businesses are expected to take reasonable steps to verify that reviews are genuine, and publishing invented ones — or paying for them — is now enforceable rather than merely frowned upon.

The EU has parallel rules under the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, and in the US the FTC finalised a rule on fake and incentivised reviews. Whichever market you sell into, the direction is the same.

What you cannot do

Practice	Why it is a problem
Offering a discount, entry to a prize draw, or a free item for a review	This is an incentivised review. Even asking for "an honest review" alongside a reward does not fix it.
Writing reviews as a customer, or asking staff and family to	Fake review. Platforms detect clustering by device and location more reliably than people expect.
Buying reviews from a service	Fake review, and the accounts used are usually already flagged.
Asking only the customers you know are happy	Known as review gating. It is prohibited by Google's own policies and misrepresents your rating.
Suppressing or hiding negative reviews you solicited	Same problem as gating, one step later in the process.

The gating point catches people out most often, because it feels sensible. Sending a survey first and only forwarding the happy respondents to Google is a filtered rating, not a real one.

What you can do

Considerably more than most businesses actually do.

Ask everyone, at the right moment

You can ask any genuine customer, and you can ask all of them. The variable that matters is timing. Ask at the point of satisfaction — as the bill is settled, at the end of the appointment, when the order arrives — not three weeks later when the feeling has faded.

Make it one tap

Every extra step loses people. Google Business Profile generates a short review link — find it in your profile under the option to ask for reviews. That link goes straight to the review box, already signed in on most phones.

Turn it into a QR code and put it where the moment happens: on the bill folder, at reception, on the delivery slip, on a card handed over at the end of a job.

Follow up once, by message

A single short message a day or two after works well. Something like: "Thanks again for coming in on Tuesday. If you have thirty seconds, a Google review really helps a small business like ours — here is the link." One follow-up. Not four.

Reply to every review

Including the bad ones, especially the bad ones. Replies are visible, they signal an active business, and a calm reply to a harsh review persuades readers more than the review itself dissuades them. Answer the substance, do not argue, and offer to take it offline.

Ask for specifics

You cannot script a review, but you can prompt the shape of it. "If you leave a review, it helps others if you mention what you came in for" produces reviews containing the words your future customers are searching for. That is legitimate — you are asking for detail, not dictating an opinion.

A system that runs without you

The reason most businesses have no recent reviews is not unwillingness. It is that asking depends on someone remembering, and people stop remembering by week three.

1. Generate the short link from your Google Business Profile.
2. Make a QR code and print it. Bill folder, reception desk, invoice footer, delivery note.
3. Add one line to your existing follow-up — the confirmation email, the after-appointment text. Not a new campaign, one line in something that already goes out.
4. Put a recurring reminder in the diary to check the profile weekly and reply to anything new.
5. Aim for a handful a month, permanently. Five a month for a year is far more valuable than sixty in one week, and it looks natural because it is.

What about a bad review you think is fake?

You can report it to Google for policy violation — off-topic, from a competitor, from someone who was never a customer. Removal is not guaranteed and the process is slow. In the meantime, reply publicly, factually and briefly. Readers are better at spotting an unreasonable reviewer than businesses give them credit for.

What does not work is panicking and generating a burst of positive reviews to bury it. A sudden spike after a bad review is exactly the pattern review filters look for.

Where to ask, ranked by what actually works

Method	Response rate	Why
Asked in person, then handed a QR code	Best by a distance	The request comes from a person, at the moment of goodwill
QR code on the bill or invoice, no verbal ask	Moderate	Present at the right moment, but easy to ignore
Text message a day later	Moderate	Short, personal, opened almost always
Email a week later	Low	Late, and competing with everything else in the inbox
Link buried in a newsletter	Negligible	Wrong context entirely

The pattern is consistent: proximity to the moment of satisfaction beats every other variable, including how well the message is written.

Reviews on other platforms

Google matters most for local search, but it is not the only place customers look. Trustpilot carries weight in UK e-commerce, Tripadvisor still matters in hospitality, and industry directories can matter in professional services.

The same rules apply everywhere: no incentives, no filtering, no writing them yourself. Spreading requests thinly across six platforms usually produces six sparse profiles, so pick the one your customers actually check, dominate it, and add a second only once the first has momentum.

How this connects to rankings

Google's local results weigh relevance, distance and prominence. Reviews feed prominence — count, average rating and recency all contribute. That is why a steady flow beats a one-off push, and why a business with fifteen recent reviews often outranks one with eighty old ones.

It is also why the shortcut is so tempting and so counterproductive. A filtered or purchased rating is a number that does not survive contact with a real customer, and in the UK it is now unlawful as well.