follow-up
Asking For the Review Without Breaking the Rule
The FTC rule on consumer reviews changed what a business may do about its own. The compliant version is also the one that gets more reviews.
The review ask is the highest-return minute in a field business, and it is also the part most likely to be done in a way that is now explicitly against the rules.
Two pieces of federal law sit on it. Both are short, both are readable, and most of the practices they prohibit are things small businesses were sold as best practice a few years ago.
The rule that changed in 2024
The FTC's Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials prohibits a set of specific practices around reviews. The ones that matter to an ordinary contractor are these.
Buying positive reviews, or negative ones about a competitor. Including through an intermediary, and including when the thing being exchanged is not cash.
Reviews from people with an undisclosed connection to the business. Employees, their families, and officers. This is not a prohibition on an employee ever reviewing their employer. It is a prohibition on doing it without the connection being clear, and on a manager soliciting it.
Fake or AI-generated reviews from people who do not exist, and reviews that misrepresent experience the writer did not have.
Suppressing negative reviews on your own site through unfounded legal threats or physical threats, or by publishing a review section that is presented as covering all reviews when in fact it has been filtered to the good ones.
The last one catches a widespread practice. A testimonial section is fine. A review widget on your own site that says it shows customer reviews, while quietly showing only the four and five star ones, is the thing the rule describes.
The gate that is not safe
The practice usually called review gating works like this: ask the customer how it went, and route the happy ones to a public review link while routing the unhappy ones to a private feedback form.
It is popular because it works, in the narrow sense that it raises a public star average. The problem is what it is: a system whose purpose is to make the public record unrepresentative of the actual experience. Sorting customers by predicted sentiment before deciding who gets asked publicly is the behaviour the rule's suppression provisions are aimed at, and several major review platforms independently prohibit it in their own terms regardless of what the law says.
The separate statute worth knowing is the Consumer Review Fairness Act at 15 U.S.C. 45b, which voids contract terms that restrict a customer's ability to review a business honestly. A non-disparagement clause in a residential contract is generally unenforceable and its presence is itself a violation. If your contract template came from a form site, this is worth checking today.
What is allowed, and works
Nothing in any of this prevents the thing that actually moves the number.
Ask everybody, at the same point, in the same words. A request that goes to every completed job is not selective, which is the whole issue. It also produces more reviews than a selective one, because the selection step is where most review programs quietly die.
Ask immediately. The window where a customer feels strongly about a finished job is measured in days. A request two weeks later gets a fraction of the response, and the responses are flatter.
Make it one tap. Every extra step costs a large share of the people who intended to do it. A direct link to the review form beats instructions on how to find it by a wide margin.
Ask the person who was there. A request that comes from the crew lead whose name the customer knows converts better than one from a brand.
Respond to the bad ones in public. A measured reply to a two-star review is read by far more prospects than the review itself, and it is the single most persuasive thing on most local profiles. It is also entirely compliant: responding is not suppressing.
Incentives, carefully
You may thank a customer. The rule is about buying an opinion, not about gratitude.
The line is whether the incentive is conditional on the content or on the act. A discount offered to anybody who leaves a review, positive or negative, disclosed as such, is a different thing from a gift card for five stars. The second is purchasing a positive review and is squarely prohibited.
The safest version, and the one that avoids having to reason about it at all, is to offer nothing and ask well. A business that does good work and asks everybody promptly does not need to buy anything.
What to keep
Keep the request. Not the review, the request: who it went to, when, and through what channel.
Two reasons. It is the only way to know your actual request-to-review rate, which is the number that tells you whether the problem is the work or the asking. And if the authenticity of your reviews is ever questioned, a dated log showing that every completed job received the same request is the evidence that there was no selection.
The FTC's guide for platforms featuring reviews is written for sites that host reviews rather than businesses that collect them, and it is still the clearest short statement of what a representative review display looks like.