What's the Deal with Review Gating? 

Many local businesses can attribute much of their success to the power of positive reviews – especially in the digital age. Every business wants positive reviews, most actively try to get reviews, and some take it a step further with a practice known as “review gating.”

This practice is considered by many to be a bit shady. Not only that, it’s against Google's rules. Yelp, TripAdvisor, and other review sites have banned the practice, as well. But how does this affect your company’s reviews? And review sites overall?

Let’s take a closer look at review gating and if it really matters to your company’s online reviews and star-ratings.

Review gating is the process of asking a customer for feedback and then using that feedback to decide whether to ask them to submit a review. To put it another way, review gating is the act of encouraging only those customers who have positive feedback to leave you a review.

The point of this, of course, is to prevent (or at least discourage) customers with less than positive feedback from leaving reviews thereby, theoretically, increasing your review ratings.

Review gating has perhaps always happened to a certain extent, even before the internet. After all, if you know someone hated your service you probably wouldn’t ask them to tell 10 friends about their experience. But in the digital age, where customers reviews are so vitally important, review gating became somewhat of a standard operating procedure for some businesses.

You should care about review gating because Google cares. A lot. And so do other review sites. Both Yelp and Google have expressly prohibited the act of selective review solicitation. Here’s an excerpt straight from Google’s policy : Don’t discourage or prohibit negative reviews or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers.

If Google catches on to your company's review gating, it could turn out very bad for you indeed. Google’s response will be to remove all the reviews on your Google My Business listing. All. Of. Them. You'd be starting from scratch. That’s a pretty devastating outcome for any business, but particularly for those businesses with many years of reviews on their listing.

Pardon me for stating the obvious, but... If you’re concerned about getting a ton of negative reviews, you might need to worry about some other things in your business other than review gating.

But yes, it’s always possible you could get a negative review. Is that really the worst thing that could happen, though? Negative reviews give you the opportunity to showcase your customer service skills. Respond to the review publicly and make things right. This shows your potential customers that you’re not always perfect, but you do always go out of your way to satisfy your customers. (Learn more about how to respond to negative reviews here .)

During the year of active review gating, the average star-rating was 4.66. During the non-gating year, average star-rating was at 4.59. A nominal decrease.

This tells us that review gating wasn’t really preventing unhappy customers from leaving reviews.

It would stand to reason that discouraging certain (unhappy) customers from leaving reviews would mean less reviews overall. And conversely, encouraging everyone equally to leave reviews would drive the numbers up. But no one really expected just how much the numbers would increase.

During the year GatherUp stopped practicing review gating with its clients, their volume of reviews increased 68%!

This awesome increase in the number of reviews more than makes up for the minuscule drop in average star-rating.

The results of the study tell us, pretty plainly , that review gating wasn’t really helping businesses all that much. Sure, the average star-rating was slightly higher, but the review volume was much lower than it could have been.

The key takeaway is this: The benefits of review gating are nominal at best, and certainly not worth risking a run-in with Google and possible loss of your all your customer ratings.

Review gating is not always blatant and can sometimes fall into a gray area. That's why all business owners need to be especially careful when it comes to soliciting reviews.

Fortunately, there’s a really simple way you can be totally sure you’re not selectively soliciting reviews. Just ask every customer! Seriously, invite each of your customers to leave you a review. This way, you aren’t encouraging or discouraging any customer based on your perception of their feedback. It’s the fair and unbiased way to solicit reviews from your customers and steer clear of Google’s review gating rules.

And when the odd negative review comes in, be sure you respond quickly and positively to turn it into a customer service win.