How to get more Google reviews without begging or breaking the rules

The short answer

Text every customer your Google review link on the day the job finishes, while they’re still pleased the boiler fires up first time. Ask everyone, including the customers who were hard work. Never pay for a review, swap one, offer money off for one or write one yourself. Google bans all of that, and since April 2025 most of it breaks UK consumer law as well.

Why asking beats waiting

Most customers who are happy with a job never think to leave a review. They pay, they say thanks, they get on with their day. The ones who go looking for your profile on their own are often the ones with something to complain about. If you wait for reviews to turn up, you can end up with a profile that makes you look worse than you are.

Google’s own help page on getting more reviews says it plainly: remind customers to leave them. That’s the whole trick. You don’t need a system or an app. You need to ask, every time, in a way that takes the customer a minute.

Say a joiner in Bury fits a new staircase on a Tuesday. If the text goes that evening, the customer is still stood in the hallway admiring it. If it goes three weeks later with the invoice reminder, the moment has passed and the staircase is just a staircase. So the timing does a lot of the work.

Get your review link first

Your Google Business Profile has to be claimed and verified before any of this works. If it isn’t, our guide to claiming your Google Business Profile walks through it.

Once it’s verified, Google’s help page on review links sets out the steps. Open your profile at business.google.com on a computer, find the “Read reviews” section and choose the option to get more reviews. You can copy the link or save a QR code. Google says the QR code can currently only be made on a computer browser, not on a phone, so do this bit at the kitchen table, not in the van.

Copy the link into a note on your phone, or save it as a text shortcut, so it’s always two taps away. Google also suggests putting it on receipts, in thank-you emails, in a WhatsApp message or in a Facebook post. A printed QR code on the back of your invoice or business card works too.

The text to send

Keep it short, friendly and in your own words. Something like this:

“Thanks for having us in today. If you’re happy with the job, a quick Google review would help a small firm like ours more than you’d think. It takes about a minute, here’s the link.”

Then the link, then your name. That’s it. No pressure, no “five stars please”, no follow-up chasing. If they don’t leave one, they don’t. One gentle reminder a few days later is fine if you sent it on a busy day, but never more than that.

Customers need to be signed into a Google account to leave a review. Google’s help page notes they can make one with an email address that isn’t Gmail, which is worth knowing if someone tells you they “don’t do Google”.

Ask everyone, not just the happy ones

This is the rule people break without realising. Google’s content policy says businesses must not “selectively solicit positive reviews from customers”. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) guidance on fake reviews says the same thing in legal language: cherry picking positive reviews can happen “by encouraging just those who are satisfied to leave reviews”, and that can count as publishing reviews in a misleading way.

So the text goes to every customer, including the one who argued about the quote and the one whose job overran. Some review tools ask the customer “were you happy?” first, then only send the happy ones on to Google. That’s the exact thing both Google and the CMA describe, so we’d steer well clear.

The upside is that real profiles look real. A 4.8 with a couple of honest four-star reviews, each with a polite reply from you, is more believable than a wall of identical fives.

What you must not do

The CMA’s fake reviews guidance (known as CMA208, published 4 April 2025) explains a ban that sits in the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. It covers fake reviews and “concealed incentivised reviews”, meaning reviews where someone got something in return and readers aren’t told. Google’s own rules go further. Between them, these are out:

• Money, discounts, vouchers or freebies in return for a review. The CMA lists all of these as forms of commissioning a review. Google calls incentives “strictly prohibited” and treats them as fake engagement. The CMA guidance says a prize draw is unlikely to count as commissioning in law, but Google bans incentives for any review, so on Google a prize draw is still a no.
• Asking your staff to write one. The CMA guidance gives “a trader requesting a member of staff to write a review” as an example of commissioning. Google’s policy counts current or former employment as a conflict of interest.
• Swapping reviews with another trade. If the plumber you swap with never had work done by you, the review isn’t based on a genuine experience, which is the CMA’s definition of a fake review.
• Writing your own under another name, or getting one person to post from several accounts. Google names that second one as fake engagement.
• Offering a refund or a gift card if someone changes or removes a bad review. The CMA uses this as one of its examples of commissioning, and Google’s rules ban incentives to change or remove negative reviews.
• Buying reviews. The CMA’s examples include reviews that look like they’re from real people but were generated by software.

Friends and family are a grey area. The CMA says a review isn’t fake just because the reviewer didn’t pay, as long as it reflects their genuine experience. If your sister-in-law really did have you rewire her kitchen, that’s a real job. But Google’s conflict of interest rule is wide, and a few glowing reviews from people who share your surname look odd to everyone. We’d leave them out.

What getting it wrong can cost

Google’s page on Business Profile restrictions lists what it can do when it finds fake engagement, on top of removing the reviews. It can stop your profile receiving new reviews for a set period. It can unpublish your existing reviews for a set period. And it can put a warning on your profile telling customers that fake reviews were removed. Google says it emails the owner before it applies a restriction. A warning like that, shown to every customer who looks you up, would do more damage than any honest bad review.

The legal side is heavier. The CMA’s announcement of 7 April 2025 says it can now decide for itself whether consumer law has been broken, without going to court, and fine businesses up to 10% of their global turnover. On 27 March 2026 it said it was investigating five businesses over reviews, including whether one firm asked staff to write positive reviews and whether another offered discounts in exchange for five-star reviews. Those are investigations, not findings. The same announcement says the CMA swept over 100 review publishers and sent advisory letters to 54 firms.

Those cases are big companies, and a one-van firm is unlikely to be at the front of the CMA’s queue. But the law doesn’t have a small business exemption, and Google’s restrictions apply to everyone. This is our plain reading of the guidance, not legal advice. If you’re unsure about something specific, speak to a solicitor.

Reviews on your own website and Facebook page

The CMA’s short guide for businesses says the rules apply to any trader who publishes consumer reviews, and names websites and social media as examples. So if you paste reviews onto your site or share them on Facebook, you’re responsible for how they’re shown.

In practice, that means quoting real reviews word for word, never tidying them up into something the customer didn’t say. Don’t pick the three best and present them as the whole picture, because the CMA says highlighting reviews that don’t reflect the overall experience can be misleading. And don’t write “every customer gives us five stars” unless it’s true on the day you say it, because the CMA counts overall ratings and review counts as information that must be accurate.

The simplest fix is to link from your site to your Google profile, so people can read the lot. Our Google Business Profile checklist covers the rest of what belongs on there.

When a bad review lands

Reply to it. Google’s tips page says to keep replies short, personal, professional and polite. Thank them, say what you’ll do, and offer to sort it offline. The reply is really for the next customer reading it, and calm beats defensive every time.

Only report a review if it breaks Google’s policies, such as spam, abuse or someone who was never your customer. Google’s help page on reporting reviews says not to report one just because you disagree with it, and that it doesn’t step into disputes between businesses and customers. If Google won’t remove it, you get one appeal. And never offer money or a discount to have it taken down.

What to do next

Tonight, on a computer, get your review link and save it on your phone. Then send it to every customer after every job this week, the same day, with a short thank you. If you’d like a second pair of eyes on your profile and reviews, our free check-up looks over the lot and tells you what we’d fix first.