Review gating
What is Review gating?
Review gating is filtering which customers get asked to leave a public review based on how happy they are (a private pre-screen routes satisfied customers to Google or Trustpilot and unhappy ones to a private feedback form instead). It is explicitly prohibited by the FTC and by Google and Trustpilot policy when it selectively suppresses negative reviews from ever being written publicly.
In more detail
The line is not "asking for reviews", it is "asking selectively". Inviting every customer to leave a review, using the same process regardless of how the visit or order went, is the legitimate, policy-compliant practice: some of those customers will leave negative reviews, and that is the point, an honest review base. Gating happens when a sentiment question comes first ("were you happy with your visit? Yes / No") and only the "yes" answers get routed to a public review link, while "no" answers are quietly diverted to a private inbox. The FTC's 2024 Rule on Consumer Reviews and Testimonials formally bars this: a business cannot misrepresent that the reviews on display represent a fair sample when it has been filtering out the negative ones before they are written. Google's and Trustpilot's own guidelines for businesses independently prohibit the same behaviour and will remove reviews, downrank listings or suspend profiles over it.
How is Review gating used in context?
“A restaurant that texts every table the same review-request link, win or lose, is asking cleanly. A restaurant that only sends that link to tables who first answered "yes, everything was great" on a private survey is gating.”
What is Review gating often confused with?
Universal review invitations
Asking every customer, regardless of expected sentiment, through the same channel and process, is the compliant baseline; nothing here restricts asking for reviews itself.
Private feedback channels
Offering an additional private way to reach support (a "if anything wasn't right, reply here instead") is fine on its own; it becomes gating only when it replaces the public review invitation for customers pre-screened as unhappy.
Read more on this
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External reference
ftc.govSee it working on a live store.
Real storefronts using the thing this page defines.
