Are you allowed to ask for reviews?

Google's policy for reviews on Maps explicitly allows a business to encourage reviews that reflect a genuine experience. What it forbids is everything that bends the result: offering payment, discounts, or free goods or services in exchange for a review, or for changing or removing a negative one; discouraging negative reviews or selectively asking for positive ones; and pressuring customers to leave a review while they are still on the premises.

In practice that means one request, sent the same way to every customer, with no reward attached and no hint about the rating you are hoping for.

Yelp's guidance is blunter. Do not ask anyone to review your business — customers, mailing list subscribers, friends or family — and do not offer freebies, discounts or payment for reviews. Its reasoning is that reviews people write because they were asked tend to be biased compared with the ones they chose to write.

It is not only a guideline. Reviews the recommendation software suspects were solicited may not be recommended, and a review that is not recommended does not count toward the business's rating. Asking for Yelp reviews can leave a business with the effort spent and nothing to show for it.

Asking for a particular rating breaks both platforms' rules: Google allows requests only when they do not try to influence the rating, and Yelp does not want the request made at all. Whether it is also against the law depends on where you are and on what you attach to the request.

This is not legal advice, but in the US the FTC's rule on consumer reviews, finalised in August 2024, prohibits offering compensation or any other incentive conditioned on a review expressing a particular sentiment — a discount for a five-star review is exactly that. The same rule prohibits presenting the reviews on your own website as all or most of the reviews you received when some were suppressed because of their rating, which matters if you display reviews with a filter on them.

Review gating means asking customers how they feel first, then sending the happy ones to Google or Yelp and the unhappy ones to a private feedback form. Some review tools still offer it as a feature. Google's policy names it — selectively soliciting positive reviews — and Yelp forbids the request in the first place.

It is worth recognising because it is rarely called gating: it looks like a friendly 'How did we do?' step with a thumbs-up path to the review site and a thumbs-down path to a form. Zyff's review widgets deliberately have no such step. Where one carries a button asking for a review, every visitor sees the same button.

The difference between the platforms is built into the defaults. The Google Reviews widget's default layout includes a 'Review us on Google' button, because Google allows asking. The Yelp Reviews widget's equivalent button, and its review-request layout, stay off until you switch them on, because Yelp asks businesses not to ask — and a review written because of the button may not be recommended.

Whichever you use, the rules above still govern everything else you do: the email after a purchase, the card in the bag, the sign by the till. A widget can be neutral about what it shows; it cannot make a review campaign compliant.