The legitimate way to get more Google reviews is to ask every customer, not just the happy ones, at the moment the job is finished, using your own Google review link or QR code, and never to offer or imply a reward for leaving one. Google's policies ban paying or discounting for a review, asking only customers you expect to be positive, and pressuring anyone to leave one on the spot, and since April 2025 commissioning fake reviews has also been a banned practice under UK consumer law. Do it the plain way, ask everyone, every time, and reply to what comes back, and it stays both effective and safe.
Why reviews are worth the effort
Google is explicit that reviews feed local ranking. Its own guidance on how local search results work says results are "mainly based on relevance, distance and popularity," and under the ranking factor it calls prominence, reviews are named directly: that factor "is also based on info like how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have." In Google's own words, "more reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking."
Google also says there's "no way to request or pay for a better local ranking", which cuts both ways: nobody, including an agency, can buy you a higher position, but a steady, genuine flow of reviews is one of the few ranking levers that's entirely within your control.
What Google's rules actually ban
Google's Prohibited and Restricted Content policy, which covers every review on a Business Profile, is specific about what crosses the line. It bans merchants who "offer incentives, such as payment, discounts, free of cost goods and/or services, in exchange for posting any review or revision or removal of a negative review", and it calls that "fake engagement", a category Google treats seriously enough to remove the content and restrict the profile.
It also bans review gating: the policy says businesses shouldn't "discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers." In practice that means a filtered link that quietly sends unhappy customers somewhere other than Google, or a habit of only messaging the customers you're confident were pleased, is against the rules even without any money changing hands.
Pressure is covered too: merchants "should not require or pressure users to leave ratings or write reviews while on the premises", and shouldn't set staff quotas for how many reviews to collect. Content from a conflict of interest, an employee, a relative, a contractor reviewing their own client, is also prohibited, as is anything posted from multiple accounts by or for one person.
And since 6 April 2025, this isn't only a Google policy question. The UK's Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 made commissioning or submitting fake reviews a banned practice under consumer law, enforced directly by the Competition and Markets Authority. What was a platform rule is now also a legal one.
How Google itself says to ask
Google's own advice is simple: create a Google review link or QR code for your Business Profile and share it, on an invoice, a WhatsApp message, a text, a card left after the job, a sign in the van. Customers need to be signed in to a Google account to leave a review, so a direct link that takes them straight there removes as much friction as possible.
The moment to ask matters more than the wording. Straight after the job is signed off, while the work is fresh and the customer is pleased with the outcome, works far better than a generic request sent out months later to an entire customer list. Google's own guidance also points out that "a mix of positive and negative feedback often feels more trustworthy" to people reading your reviews, so there's no upside to filtering who gets asked, beyond the fact that it's against the rules.
Replying, and what to do about a bad one
Every review is worth a reply, good or bad. A short, genuine response to a positive review costs little and shows the profile is looked after. A calm, factual reply to a negative one matters more, future customers read it, and how you handled a complaint often says more than the complaint itself.
If a review is genuinely fake, from someone who was never a customer, posted by a competitor, or breaks Google's content policy in some other way, you can report it through Google's own review-flagging tool. That's the correct route for a review that shouldn't exist. It isn't the correct route for a genuine but unflattering review, Google only removes content that breaks its policies, not content a business simply dislikes.
Making it a routine, not a one-off push
A single campaign to chase reviews, a text blast to old customers, a competition, a one-week push, tends to produce a spike followed by silence, and Google's own policy specifically flags "unusual volumes or patterns of review contributions that are indicative of efforts to manipulate a place's rating" as against the rules. The businesses that keep climbing are the ones where asking is simply built into finishing a job: the same link or QR code, offered the same way, every time, whether the customer books again next year or never again.
That consistency is also what keeps you safely inside the rules. There's no decision to make about who gets asked and who doesn't once asking is automatic for every customer, which removes the temptation toward gating before it starts.