Review request audit: does your review ask break the rules?

What the FTC rule actually bans

The FTC’s Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule, 16 CFR Part 465, has been in force since October 21, 2024. It is the first federal rule written specifically about reviews, and for a business that asks customers for them, three parts matter most.

• Incentives tied to sentiment. The rule bans giving compensation or any other incentive in exchange for a review when the incentive is conditioned, expressly or by implication, on the review expressing a particular sentiment. “Leave us 5 stars and get 15% off” is the textbook case, and so is a prize draw that only positive reviewers can enter. The condition is the violation, not the discount: an incentive offered for an honest review of any rating is a disclosure question, covered below.
• Undisclosed insiders. Officers and managers may not review their own business, and a business may not solicit or publish reviews written by its employees, agents or their relatives unless the relationship is clearly and conspicuously disclosed in the review itself. A disclosure keeps you inside the FTC rule; it does not keep you inside Google’s, which removes insider reviews either way.
• Suppression. It is a violation to use unfounded legal threats, intimidation or false accusations to stop or remove a review, and to present the reviews on your own site or widget as representative while hiding the ones with low ratings or negative sentiment. Filtering is allowed only on criteria applied equally to every review regardless of its rating: spam, personal data, off-topic content. If your terms of service contain a clause that forbids customers from posting bad reviews, that is a separate and older problem, covered in our post on the Consumer Review Fairness Act.

Civil penalties run up to $53,088 per violation. That is the January 2025 inflation adjustment under 16 CFR 1.98, and the FTC confirmed in September 2026 that it stays in force through 2026, so the figure the tool quotes is current. Per violation can mean per review, which is what makes a template with a bad sentence in it expensive. The FTC closed 2025 by sending warning letters to nearly a dozen companies under this rule; what has actually been enforced so far is worth reading before deciding the risk is theoretical.

Why Google bans every incentive while the FTC does not

The FTC rule bans the condition, not the reward. An unconditional reward for an honest review is legal under the rule, but the FTC’s Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255) and its guide for marketers on soliciting reviews treat the reward as a possible source of bias, so it has to be disclosed in the review itself, clearly and conspicuously. That is why the tool marks an unconditional incentive as a warning, not a block, when no platform policy is in play: the fix is a sentence telling customers to mention the reward in what they write.

Google is stricter. Its policy on prohibited and restricted content says merchants may not offer incentives, such as payment, discounts, free goods or services, in exchange for posting any review, or for revising or removing a negative one. There is no disclosed-incentive exception: rewarded reviews are classed as rating manipulation and removed, and a pattern of them can restrict the Business Profile. Yelp, Tripadvisor and BBB take the same line with their own penalties (a public Compensated Activity Alert on Yelp, ranking penalties and a red warning badge on Tripadvisor, outright rejection at BBB). So the same 15% off is a disclosure problem under federal law and a ban on the platforms most small businesses depend on, and the tool reports both. The FTC’s own guide makes the point: some platforms prohibit rewarded reviews outright, disclosure or not. The long version, with the exact wording of each policy, is in our post on discounts for reviews.

What review gating is, and why Google and the FTC both reach it

Gating is screening customers before you show them the review link: a “how did we do?” question, a thumbs up or down, or staff deciding who gets the card. Happy customers go to Google; unhappy ones go to a private feedback form, or nowhere. It feels sensible, most review software offers it as a feature, and it is the single most common thing this tool flags.

The FTC’s guide for marketers is blunt: do not ask for reviews only from customers you think will leave positive ones, because the result misrepresents what your customers experienced. The rule itself separately bans hiding negative reviews on your own site based on their rating. Google’s policy says merchants may not discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers; asking about satisfaction first and sending only the happy ones to Google is exactly that, and Google removes reviews it classes as rating manipulation. Trustpilot writes the same idea as a principle, invite all customers or none, and says that if inviting everyone is impossible you should use an equally impartial method, such as every third customer.

The fix is the same everywhere: send every customer the same request with the same link. If you want private feedback too, offer it alongside the public link in the same message, not as a gate in front of it. The tool catches the wording version of gating (“if you were happy with your visit...”) from the text, and the process version from your answer to the first question under Who you ask.

The text message consent point

If you send review requests by text, the question that matters most is not what the message says but whether the customer agreed to receive it. The TCPA and the FCC’s rules at 47 CFR 64.1200 require consent before automated texts go to mobile numbers: prior express written consent for anything that markets your goods or services, and at least prior express consent for purely informational texts. A review request sent to customers who never agreed to receive texts has no consent to stand on, which is why the tool treats that answer as a block rather than a warning.

Since April 11, 2025 the FCC also requires you to act on a revocation made by any reasonable means. A reply of STOP, QUIT, END, REVOKE, OPT OUT, CANCEL or UNSUBSCRIBE is definitive, and you have 10 business days to act on it. The FCC waived only the “revoke all” cross-topic portion of that rule, currently until January 31, 2027. The sender is the one who has to prove consent existed, so record what the customer agreed to, when, how and on which number, start each text with your business name, and end it with a short opt-out line. Email has its own footer rule: a review request that also carries a promotion is a commercial message under CAN-SPAM, so it needs a working unsubscribe link and your physical postal address, and the FTC puts the penalty at up to $53,088 per separate email. A plain review request is arguably transactional, but the FTC judges by primary purpose and its guide does not address review requests by name, so the cheap answer is to include both anyway.

How to use the result

Fix before you send means the wording or the practice breaks a written rule as the tool reads it; stop sending until it is changed. Warnings mean a disclosure or an element is missing, or a platform you selected discourages what you are doing; clear them before the next batch. Notes are things to check or record, such as proof of consent or whether CAN-SPAM applies to your email at all.

Each finding quotes the excerpt or the answer that triggered it, so you can see exactly what to change, and links the policy it rests on with the date we last checked it. The rules are deterministic: the same text and answers always give the same result, and a clean result means the tool found nothing, not that a regulator would agree. Where a finding depends on a judgement call, such as whether an email counts as commercial, the note says so.

Expect the audit to run clean on a short, plain ask: name the business, ask for an honest review of any rating, give one link, say how to opt out. Our guide to getting more reviews legally covers what that looks like in practice, and the post on asking for reviews without violating Google’s policy has the exact wording that passes both rulebooks.