You can ask for a review. You cannot pay for a good one. Federal rules ban handing someone a discount, a gift card, or a raffle ticket on the condition that their review says something nice, and Google’s own policy goes further and bans the offer even when you never ask for a good word.
What the federal rule actually says
The Federal Trade Commission published its Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials in the Federal Register on August 22, 2024, beginning at 89 FR 68034. It took effect on October 21, 2024. It now sits in the Code of Federal Regulations at 16 CFR Part 465.
The part that covers this is one sentence. Section 465.4, headed “Buying positive or negative consumer reviews,” makes it an unfair or deceptive act for a business to provide “compensation or other incentives in exchange for, or conditioned expressly or by implication on, the writing or creation of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, whether positive or negative.”
Read that twice. The trigger is the sentiment, not the money. Asking for a review is fine. Tying a reward to the review saying something good is not.
The rule is not fussy about the form the reward takes. Its own definition of buying a review, at section 465.1, covers “money, gift certificates, products, services, discounts, coupons, contest entries, or another review.” A free filter change counts. A raffle ticket counts.
“Expressly or by implication” is the phrase to watch. You never have to write “five stars only” to break it. Asking a customer to say how much they loved the job, and handing over $20, carries the condition in the wording. The Commission said as much when it finalized the rule: reviews conditioned on a customer saying how much they “loved their visit” are likely false whatever disclosure sits beside them.
This is not legal advice. Your state has its own consumer protection law sitting on top of the federal one, and these get enforced case by case. Before you run any offer tied to reviews, ask your own attorney or check with your state attorney general’s office.
Google’s rules are stricter than the law
The second question matters more day to day. Even where the federal rule leaves a gap, Google does not.
Google’s Maps user generated content policy, under prohibited and restricted content, says contributions “should reflect a genuine experience at a place or business.” It then names offering incentives, including payment, discounts, and free goods or services, in exchange for posting any review. It names the same thing again for getting someone to revise or remove a negative review. That page carries no update date.
Notice what is missing. There is no sentiment test in Google’s version. The offer itself is the violation. A straight “leave us a review, good or bad, and take $10 off” clears section 465.4 and still breaks Google’s policy. Paying to have a bad one revised or taken down is named in the same line, so getting one removed is a different job.
The policy says incentivized reviews will be removed from Maps. It also says that where behavior harms Google’s users, community, employees or ecosystem, the actions range from suspending account privileges to account termination, and that Google weighs the content itself, the account information, the user’s actions, and whether a pattern of harmful behavior exists.
That is the real cost for a one truck shop. Losing a stack of reviews and a verified profile stings long before a federal case ever would.
The narrow gap the FTC leaves, and why it will not help you
The FTC’s Endorsement Guides, at 16 CFR Part 255, were published at 88 FR 48092 on July 26, 2023. They work through this in plain examples.
Example 9 in section 255.2 describes a manufacturer paying real purchasers $20 each to write positive reviews. The Guides call those reviews deceptive even when the payment is disclosed. Then comes the exception. If the reviews were never required to be positive, and reviewers understood there were no bad consequences for writing a negative one, “a clear and conspicuous disclosure of the material connection would be appropriate.”
The Commission said the same thing again when it finalized the review rule: incentives given for reviews with no requirement about sentiment must be disclosed clearly and conspicuously.
So a narrow path exists in federal law. It is not a path onto Google. Every review that would carry that disclosure is a review Google’s policy says should never have been bought.
Only asking the happy ones is its own trap
Plenty of contractors skip incentives and do something that feels safer. They text a survey first, and only the customers who answer well get the Google link. That move has a name.
The FTC calls it review gating, and describes it as asking past customers for feedback and then inviting only the ones who gave positive feedback to post online. In the final rule the Commission wrote that section 465.4 “does not cover” review gating, then added that gating “can nonetheless violate section 5 of the FTC Act.”
Example 11 of the Endorsement Guides lays out both sides. Sorting customers and sending only the pleased ones onward may be unfair or deceptive if it results in the posted reviews being “substantially more positive” than they otherwise would have been. Then the useful half. If the business “had simply invited all recent purchasers to provide feedback on third-party websites, the solicitation would not have been unfair or deceptive, even if it had expressed its hope for positive reviews.”
That is the whole method, printed by the agency that enforces it. Ask everybody. You are allowed to say you hope it goes well.
A number you can check, and the limit on it
The maximum civil penalty for a rule violation is set at 16 CFR 1.98. It currently lists $53,088 per violation under section 5(m)(1)(A) of the FTC Act, from the adjustment published on January 17, 2025. The FTC raises it for inflation, so open that section yourself rather than trusting the figure secondhand.
Here is the honest limit on that number. It is a maximum written into a table, not a forecast. Nobody can tell you what the FTC would do about a plumber who ran a “$20 off for a review” card for one summer, and anyone quoting you an expected fine is guessing. The predictable outcome is the Google one: reviews stripped, and a profile you may have to fight to get back.
There is also nothing to buy here. The policy bans the offer itself, so no tool and no package makes an incentivized review acceptable to Google, and nothing we sell puts back a review Google has taken down. Anyone selling a review package that pays your customers is selling you the violation.
What to do next
- Take down any sign, card, invoice line, or text message that ties a reward to a review. Do that today.
- Rewrite the ask so it goes to every customer, not just the pleased ones, and says nothing about stars.
- Send one link, straight to your Google review form, within a day of finishing the job.
- Read 16 CFR 465.4 yourself. It is one sentence, and it is free to read.
- If you have already run an offer, write down what you offered and when, then take that to your attorney instead of guessing.
Whether the badge on top of your profile is worth the screening is a separate question with its own answer. The rest of this work is unglamorous. Answer the phone, do the job well, ask everyone, and make sure the person who reads a good review lands on a site that loads fast and answers the question, with the reviews you copy onto it following the same rules. If you want to see what is already being said about you before you change anything, a free scan runs the questions your customers ask and writes down who gets named.