Most of what a business owner has heard about review rules is a guess. This page answers
No. Google's policy for contributed content bans any offer of payment, a discount, or free goods or services in exchange for a review, whether the review gets posted, edited, or deleted. The ban runs in both directions: you cannot pay someone to post a good review, and you cannot pay someone to take down a bad one.
A punch card where the tenth coffee is free for a review, a gift for anyone who leaves five stars, and a raffle entry for reviewers all fall under the same rule as straight cash. The size of the reward does not matter. What matters is that a review was the condition for it.
No, and this is the rule most often confused with a myth about "banned kiosks." Google's own rule is about pressure, not furniture: a business should not require or pressure someone to post a review on the spot, and should not tell them what to write.
A tablet that belongs to the business, with staff watching over a customer's shoulder until a review appears, is exactly the situation the rule targets. A card a guest taps with their own phone, and walks away with, is not the same thing, because nobody is standing over them and nobody has to use it at all.
No, and both of these are banned separately. Google's policy names businesses that require staff to obtain a specific number of reviews, and, separately, businesses that require staff to obtain reviews with specific content. The obligation runs in both directions: how many reviews and what they say.
The ban sits on the business's request, not on a customer who genuinely chooses to write one on their own. A review from an owner or an employee about their own business also fails Google's one real condition for a valid review in the first place, a genuine customer experience, which is why staff-written reviews are a separate problem covered on its own page.
No, and this rule shuts down a whole category of software. Google's policy bans selecting who you ask for a review based on how satisfied they look. A tool that asks how a visit went first, then only forwards the happy answers to Google, does exactly that.
What works instead is asking everyone the same way and letting the customer decide. A screen that offers a Google review and a private message to the owner side by side, the same way to every guest, does not know anything about how the visit went until the customer picks one.
You may ask. Google's own policy permits requesting or encouraging the posting of content that reflects a genuine experience, as long as no incentive is offered in connection with it. A sign at the register, an email, a line on the receipt, and a QR code that leads straight to the review form are all fine, as long as nothing is offered in exchange and nobody is told what to write.
This is also the answer to whether a QR code on the counter is allowed at all. It is, as long as it is an offer and not a condition attached to anything.
No. A review a customer wrote that does not break any rule cannot be switched off or hidden, not even with a paid version of the profile. The only route is reporting a specific review that actually breaks a policy, and Google is direct about what that is not: do not report a review just because you disagree with it.
There is one narrow exception, and it runs the other way. Google has said it may temporarily restrict user-generated content, including reviews, on some profiles to protect an owner, most likely against a sudden wave of suspicious activity. That is not a button an owner presses; it arrives without warning when Google's own systems decide to apply it.
Yes. A reply you post to a review also passes through Google's review process before it appears, which usually takes a matter of minutes but can occasionally run longer. This is a separate check from whether the original review stays up, and it applies to your words, not the reviewer's.
Yes, at a scale that runs on automation, not case by case appeals to a person. Google's own count for a recent year puts the number of policy-violating reviews removed in the hundreds of millions, with well over half a million accounts restricted worldwide over the same period. That is a global figure and it says nothing about any one business's profile, but it does mean the rules above are not a formality that nobody checks.
No. A card that offers a Google review and a private message equally, with no incentive attached to either one, already satisfies every rule on this page. Valtela runs $599 a year for the watch on your listing and the card itself, and an extra card for a second counter is $79 a year; the full pricing has the rest.
If someone else wrote you a review that actually breaks one of the rules above, a fake Google review walks through reporting it and what happens after a rejection. If the question is what your own staff or your own website can and cannot do about a discount, discount for a review and review gating both go further into the specific situations this page only summarizes.
Every citation on this page comes from one of these pages. The link goes to the original source, not to our summary of it.
$599a year, plus $79 for each extra card. See the full price.