Review Gating
The practice of selectively soliciting reviews only from customers expected to leave positive ones, or discouraging unhappy customers from leaving public reviews. Google's content policy prohibits gating.
Definition
Review gating is the practice of selectively asking only happy customers for reviews, or actively discouraging unhappy customers from posting publicly. Google's content policy prohibits this. The industry convention — adopted by most review-funnel platforms — is that offering customers a private feedback form based on their initial star rating is acceptable as long as every customer retains an equal opportunity to post a public review. That convention has generally been tolerated by Google's enforcement team, but Google has not explicitly blessed the star-filter pattern in writing, and the line between 'routing' and 'gating' is fuzzier than most vendor marketing suggests. The safest interpretation: never block, suppress, or selectively omit the public-review option — all customers should see it, no matter what they rated.
Example
LIKELY GATING: A plumber only sends review request SMS to customers who tipped generously, skipping the ones who complained. LOWER-RISK ROUTING: A plumber sends every customer the same SMS — the ones who tap 1 star see a 'tell us what went wrong' form first, but the form itself includes a clearly-visible link saying 'or leave a public Google review.'
Related terms
- Review Funnel →A customer flow that routes 4–5 star experiences to public review sites (like Google) and 1–3 star experiences to a private feedback channel the business owner sees directly.
- Star Filter →The component inside a review funnel that decides which customers are routed to Google versus which are routed to private feedback, based on a star rating they give first.
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