GoodMarksWhy the FTC entered the review market
For most of the two-decade history of online consumer reviews, the major platforms — Google, Yelp, Tripadvisor — self-regulated the integrity of their review ecosystems through their own content policies. Fake reviews, review suppression, and review gating were violations of platform terms, but violations of platform terms are enforced by the platforms themselves, not by law.
The FTC's October 2024 Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials changed this. For the first time, specific review manipulation practices became violations of federal regulation — enforceable by the FTC, with civil penalties attached.
Understanding the rule is not optional for service businesses that collect reviews. The practices it prohibits were widespread before October 2024; many businesses operated them without knowing the conduct had a name, let alone that it was problematic. That ignorance no longer provides protection.
What the rule prohibits
The FTC rule identifies several distinct prohibited practices. Three are most relevant for service businesses:
Review gating
Review gating is the practice of pre-screening customers before directing them to a public review platform. The standard implementation: a business sends a "how did we do?" survey. Customers who respond positively receive a follow-up with a link to Google or Yelp. Customers who respond negatively receive a different message — perhaps an apology, a service recovery offer, or simply nothing — but are not given the link.
The effect is a review distribution that systematically overrepresents satisfied customers. The ratings visible to consumers do not reflect the actual distribution of customer experiences; they reflect only the customers who were allowed to exit through the public gate.
The FTC rule prohibits "the use of practices that suppress or fail to publish negative reviews." A review request system that routes happy customers to public platforms and routes unhappy customers away from them is, by design, suppressing negative reviews by preventing them from being solicited.
Fake and incentivized reviews
The rule also prohibits fake reviews (reviews by people who did not have the experience described) and incentivized reviews where the incentive is not clearly disclosed. Offering a discount or gift card in exchange for a review without disclosing the incentive violates the rule.
Insider reviews
Reviews by employees, company officers, or immediate family members who do not disclose their relationship to the business are prohibited. This applies to reviews of the business's own products or services and to reviews of competitors meant to harm their ratings.
What the rule permits: routing
The rule does not prohibit asking customers for reviews. It does not prohibit directing customers to specific platforms. It does not prohibit sending review requests through SMS or email. All of these practices are explicitly permitted.
What it permits — and what GoodMarks is built to do — is routing: the practice of directing customers to the review platform that is most valuable for your business, with all customers receiving the same access to leave a public review regardless of what they expressed beforehand.
The legal line is about conditional access. You may choose which platform to send customers to. You may not make access to that platform conditional on a prior indication that the customer is happy.
In practice, this means:
Permitted: Send all customers who complete a service to your Google Business Profile. Route some to Yelp or Healthgrades based on platform strategy.
Permitted: Offer a private feedback option (a form or email) alongside the public review link, so customers who prefer to communicate concerns privately have that option in addition to the public platform.
Not permitted: Ask "how was your experience?" and only send customers who answer positively to Google.
Not permitted: Use a survey screen that filters customers by satisfaction score and exclusively routes high scorers to public review platforms.
The $51,744 per violation exposure
The civil penalty attached to violations — up to $51,744 per violation — carries an implication that requires careful reading. The FTC has indicated that each act constituting a violation can be counted separately.
For a business that ran a review-gating system and sent 500 review requests over a period of time, screening customers before routing them, the exposure could theoretically be calculated at 500 times the per-violation cap. Even if enforcement took a more conservative approach, the aggregate exposure is significant for businesses with high transaction volume.
No enforcement cases under the October 2024 rule had been publicly resolved at the time of this report's publication. The FTC's stated enforcement priorities focus on the largest and most egregious violators, and small local service businesses are not currently the primary focus of FTC review enforcement. But the legal risk from operating a gating system is real, and the defense of not knowing the rule existed is not available to businesses operating in good faith on this question.
A practical compliance audit
If your current review collection system involves any of the following, it requires review for compliance:
- A "how would you rate your experience?" question before the review link is presented
- Different messages sent to customers who respond with high scores vs. low scores
- A satisfaction survey step that customers must pass to receive a review request
- Employees told to only ask happy customers for reviews
A compliant system has a single path: all customers who complete a service receive a review request. The request includes a link to the public review platform. An optional private feedback path may be offered alongside it, but it may not replace or condition access to the public path.
The business benefit of compliance extends beyond legal risk reduction. Review gating produces a systematically unreliable public rating — one that overrepresents the high end of the actual experience distribution. Over time, the mismatch between a 4.9-star rating and the actual median customer experience creates trust problems of a different kind: negative reviews when they do appear look disproportionately anomalous, and customers who had average experiences may feel misled.
An honest rating, built from a complete sample of customer experiences, is more durable as a trust asset. It accurately represents what a new customer will likely encounter — which is the function a review system is supposed to serve.
The review routing model
GoodMarks and review routing systems built on the same principle resolve the compliance question by design: the routing decision (which platform to send to) happens after the review request is sent, based on platform strategy — not based on a prior screening of customer sentiment. Every customer exits the service experience with access to the same public review opportunity. The platform they are directed to is chosen by the business, not by a filter that tested their happiness first.
This is not merely legal compliance. It is the right model for building a review profile that accurately represents what your business delivers — and that consumers can trust to help them make good decisions.