Review Gating
The prohibited practice of filtering customers so only happy ones are asked for public reviews — banned by Google and most review platforms.
Review gating is the tactic of surveying customers privately first and steering only the satisfied ones to leave a public review while diverting unhappy ones elsewhere. It inflates ratings artificially, and Google, the FTC, and most platforms explicitly prohibit it because it misleads consumers.
The compliant alternative is to ask every customer for a review without filtering by sentiment, then handle negative feedback openly with a professional response. Genuine, unfiltered review generation builds a rating that survives scrutiny, whereas gating risks profile suspension and penalties that cost far more than a few bad reviews ever would.
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