Yes, asking is legal and encouraged by Google. What is not legal under Google's Terms of Service is offering anything in exchange for a review (discounts, gift cards, freebies), filtering which customers you ask based on a pre-screening survey (review gating), or generating reviews from non-customers. The line is asking versus incentivizing or filtering. We stay on the right side of it.
Review gating is when a business asks customers about their experience first, and only routes the happy ones to leave a public Google review while sending unhappy ones to a private feedback form. Google explicitly bans this because it produces an artificially inflated rating that does not reflect actual customer experience. Many small business review platforms still do this by default. We use a compliant alternative that asks everyone for a review while still giving upset customers a path to private feedback before they are routed.
Yes, and they do. Suspensions for fake reviews, review gating, or incentivized reviews can wipe years of legitimate reviews along with the suspect ones. Reinstatement is possible but slow, and there is no guarantee. Most small businesses never know they are at risk until it happens. Auditing the review process is the cheapest insurance you can buy.
Most clients see meaningful review velocity within thirty days of going live. The exact number depends on your monthly customer volume and how the requests are timed, an HVAC company sending a request after every service call will see different numbers than a high-end consultancy with twenty engagements a year. We tune the system to your customer flow.
Reputation management tools and review request automation are included in our Solo and Full monthly plans starting at $395 a month. Higher-volume businesses or those needing dedicated review response support can scale into custom engagements. Full pricing is on our pricing page.
Sometimes, in narrow circumstances. Google will remove reviews that violate their content policies, profanity, hate speech, conflict of interest, off-topic. They will not remove a review just because it is negative or because the customer is wrong. We help you flag legitimately removable reviews and craft public responses to the ones that have to stay.
Yes. Google is the priority because it carries the most weight, but our review platform aggregates Yelp, Facebook, BBB, Angie's List, and most industry-specific review sites into one inbox. You respond from one place, we report on all of it, and the request system can route customers to whichever platform you most need to grow.
