Every business owner knows online reviews are pure gold. Google, Yelp or Facebook five-star ratings can generate a steady stream of eager new customers right to your doorstep. But on the other hand, a flurry of bad reviews can really hit you hard.
Bad reviews can do damage to sales and so it is incredibly tempting for businesses to try and dictate the narrative. This desire to weed out the bad feedback has resulted in a common practice known as review gating.
What Exactly Is Review Gating?
Before we get into the risks, let’s start by understanding how review gating works in the real world. Review gating is the process of sending an initial survey to customers to “test the waters” before sending them to a public review website. A business typically sends an email or text message with a simple question.
If the customer chooses a positive option, the system automatically prompts them to a public review page on Google or Yelp and encourages them to share their thoughts with the world. But if a customer selects a negative option, they are blocked from seeing the public review link. Rather, they are led to a private feedback form where they can type their complaints straight to the management of the business. In a nutshell, it’s a digital funnel for publishing the good feedback and hiding the bad.
How Review Gating Can Get You Into Trouble
If you are currently filtering your customer feedback or thinking about it, here is a simple, straightforward explanation on why review can land you in trouble and why it is bad for business.
It Violates Major Platform Terms Of Service
The big reason number one that review gating is dangerous is that it breaks the rules of the platforms you rely on for visibility. Large tech firms such as Google and Yelp want their review systems to be fair and genuine. They want everyday consumers to have a real picture of what a business is really like, warts and all.
If you do review gating, you are breaking the terms of service you agreed to when setting up your business profiles. Google’s Strict Policy Google states that businesses should not interfere or discourage negative reviews or selectively ask customers for positive reviews.
- The fallout of getting caught: If a platform’s algorithm or a crafty user catches you gating reviews, the penalties can be severe. Google and Yelp can totally wipe out all your hard-earned, legitimate reviews. In the worst cases, they can slap a public warning label on your listing, telling searchers that your reviews can’t be trusted or they can suspend your business profile entirely.
Just imagine, all those years of good customer history gone overnight because you tried to hide some bad comments. When the numbers don’t compute.
It Can Attract Legal And Regulatory Penalties
It’s bad enough to break a website’s rules, but review gating can also cross the line into illegal territory. Review gating is a form of consumer deception, at least in the eyes of government agencies that protect consumers.
You are artificially boosting your rating by curating your review stream to only show the best experiences. Regulators say it misleads the public and creates an unfair playing ground for competitors that do play by the rules.
- Cracking Down on Deception: In recent years, consumer protection agencies have become more aggressive in their enforcement against deceptive reviews.
- Significant Monetary Penalties: Companies that have been caught using software or practices that consciously filter out unhappy customers have received large financial fines. Governments are making it clear: public reviews should be an authentic and unaltered expression of customer sentiment.
It Destroys Authentic Customer Trust
More than the risk of tech penalties and legal fines, review gating has a steep hidden cost: it kills what you’re attempting to create, which is trust.
Today consumers are very sceptical, very savvy on the internet. When a shopper arrives at a business page with hundreds of reviews and not one of them has anything but a perfect five-star rating with no complaints whatsoever, a red flag goes up. It just doesn’t feel right because no business is perfect.
Just a few bad or neutral reviews actually contribute to the authenticity of your business. Many consumers read negative reviews just to see how a business handles criticism. When you hide those negative reviews, you are denying yourself the opportunity to demonstrate to future customers that you are a responsible, empathetic business that corrects its mistakes.
How To Gather Reviews The Right And Safe Way
You don’t need to gate reviews to create a beautiful online reputation. The most sustainable, safe way to do this is to ask every single customer, no matter how the experience went, for their honest feedback.
- Choose the Honest Way: Email or text the link to your public review page to everyone you do business with.
- Hear the Criticisms: When a negative review inevitably pops up, look at it as a free business consultation. It points out a weakness in your customer service, product quality or delivery speed that you need to fix.
- Reply with Ease: Answer bad reviews promptly, courteously and professionally. Apologise for the mistake and suggest taking the conversation offline to resolve the issue.
Building A Long-Term Reputation
You don’t engineer an authentic online reputation with clever filters and back doors. It’s built on consistently delivering a great product and correcting mistakes with integrity.
Review gating can provide a short, artificial bump to your star rating, but the risks are too great. It is the honesty that will keep your digital footprint safe in the long run. Dump the filters, treat all feedback as valuable data, invite open conversation and you’ll build an authentic brand image that both search engines and real customers will happily trust.
