Review gating is filtering customers before you ask for a public review — typically a survey that routes happy customers to Google and unhappy ones to a private feedback form. It is against Google’s policies, and since 2024 the FTC has treated it as a deceptive practice with real financial penalties attached.
Why it is prohibited rather than just discouraged
The problem is not that you asked. The problem is that the resulting rating describes a filtered sample while presenting itself as a representative one. A 4.9 built from only pre-screened happy customers tells a prospective buyer something false about your business, and both Google’s review policies and the FTC’s rules on endorsements treat that as deception rather than marketing.
Google’s enforcement is uneven — plenty of gated profiles sit there untouched — which is exactly what makes it tempting. The FTC exposure is the part worth taking seriously, because it does not depend on Google noticing.
What gating actually looks like
Most businesses doing this do not think of it as gating. The common patterns:
- A “how did we do?” survey where 4–5 stars gets a Google link and 1–3 stars gets a private form
- Review software configured with a satisfaction threshold before the public request fires
- Staff instructed to only ask customers who “seemed happy”
- An incentive offered for a positive review specifically, rather than for any review
That last one is a separate violation on its own: incentivizing positive reviews is prohibited even without the filtering step.
What to do instead
Ask everyone, and make it easy. The counterintuitive part is that unfiltered asking usually produces a better profile than gating does, because volume and recency carry weight and a small number of mediocre reviews next to many good ones reads as authentic. A flawless rating with thin volume reads as purchased.
The mechanics that work: send the request within an hour or two of the job while the experience is fresh, send it by text rather than email, link directly to the review form rather than to your profile, and respond to everything that arrives. If you are worried about what unfiltered asking will surface, that is useful information about the service itself — and it is cheaper to learn it now than from a reputation you have to repair later.
The full breakdown of Google’s review policy covers the enforcement history and what compliant request workflows look like in practice.