Responding To Reviews · 2.8
Never Incentivising Or Gating Reviews
Not offering a discount, prize, or thank-you for a review, and not filtering who gets asked based on how happy they seemed first — both are against every major platform's terms, and both are the kind of thing that unravels badly if noticed.
Why this matters
The customer’s side
Incentivised reviews read differently, even when they're genuine — readers are increasingly good at spotting the pattern, and a review profile that looks bought rather than earned undermines trust in every review on it, not just the incentivised ones.
The search engine’s side
Prerequisite — a rule, not a ranking lever
This is a platform-terms issue rather than a ranking factor — Google, Trustpilot, and every major review platform explicitly prohibit incentivised or filtered reviews, and a profile caught doing it risks having reviews removed or the whole profile suspended, which is a far bigger loss than any single review was worth.
How to check yours
- 1
Check whether your current review-request process offers anything — a discount, entry into a draw, a thank-you gift — in exchange for a review.
- 2
Check whether the request goes out to everyone equally, or only to clients who seemed happiest first.
How to fix what you find
If any incentive is currently offered
remove it. If you want to thank people for their time, do it separately and explicitly not tied to leaving a review at all.
If requests are only sent to clients who seemed satisfied
send the request to everyone. A few honest negative reviews from a genuinely broad base build far more trust than a suspiciously perfect score.
Keeping on top of it
Set once as a standing rule, not something to revisit — this one's binary, not a matter of degree.
How Reyse handles this
Done With You
we build your request process to be compliant with every platform's rules from the start.
Done For You
we run the entire request system within every platform's actual terms, so you're never at risk of losing reviews you've earned.