One rule now covers fake reviews, bought reviews, and hiding the bad ones, with real
Most advice about reviews and the law in the United States used to be scattered across state consumer-protection statutes and old Federal Trade Commission guidance nobody read. That changed with a federal rule specifically about reviews, and it covers more ground than most business owners assume: not just fake reviews, but who is allowed to write one, who has to disclose a connection to the business, and whether you may quietly steer only the good ones onto Google.
This page is the practical version of that rule: what it bans outright, what it means for a review someone else wrote about you, and where a separate question, defamation, starts.
The Federal Trade Commission's Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials is a federal rule, not guidance a business can choose to follow. It bans writing or selling fake or false consumer reviews, including reviews generated to look like they came from a real customer who never existed. It bans buying a review, whether the payment is for a positive review or for burying a negative one. It bans a business officer, employee, or their close relative posting a review about that business without clearly disclosing the connection. And it bans a company running a review website of its own while claiming the reviews on it are independent, when the company controls the content.
The rule reaches conduct, not just the review itself: a business that pays for reviews is liable under this rule even if the reviews happen to be true.
This is not a rule with no teeth. The FTC's own announcement of the final rule describes civil penalties that can run into the tens of thousands of dollars per violation, and the agency has already brought enforcement actions naming specific companies under the older guidance this rule replaced. Each fake review, each undisclosed insider review, and each act of review suppression can be treated as its own violation, which is how a small number of bad practices turns into a large exposure quickly.
There is no dollar threshold below which the rule does not apply. A single-location business using an employee's account to post reviews is inside the same rule as a national chain running a review farm.
A genuine, unpaid review that a real customer wrote on their own, describing their own actual experience, is not something you are liable for, good or bad. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is the reason: it treats the platform hosting the review, and generally the business whose profile it sits on, as not the publisher or speaker of content someone else wrote. Google runs the moderation on its own platform; the business did not write the review and does not control what stays up once it is genuine.
Where liability actually attaches is to what the business itself did: soliciting the review with an incentive, writing it, buying it, or pressuring the reviewer, all put you back inside the federal rule above. The line is authorship and inducement, not the content of what somebody honestly wrote.
A review that states something false and specific about you, in a way that damages your reputation, can raise a defamation claim, which is a matter of state law rather than the federal review rule above. Defamation law differs from state to state, and whether a specific review clears the bar for it depends on facts a general page like this one cannot resolve for you.
What is worth knowing in general terms: many states have a small claims process that does not require a lawyer and has a cap on damages, which is often the realistic first stop for a single false review rather than a full lawsuit. Whether a specific statement is opinion, which is generally protected, or a false statement of fact, which is not, is exactly the kind of question a local attorney answers, not a marketing page.
The same federal rule separately addresses a practice known as review gating: soliciting reviews in a way designed to result in only positive reviews being publicly visible, for example by directing a happy customer straight to a public review site while routing an unhappy one to a private feedback form instead, based on their answer to a satisfaction question. That selective routing is now its own violation under the rule, independent of whether any individual review is fake.
What the rule allows is asking every customer the same way, with no branching based on how the visit went, and letting each one choose for themselves whether to leave a public review or send a private complaint.
Practically, the rule points toward one shape and away from several common practices at once: no incentive tied to a review, no employee or family reviews without clear disclosure, no filtering based on how a visit went, and no legal threats aimed at getting a negative review taken down. A card that offers a Google review and a private message to the owner, with equal weight and no question about satisfaction asked first, is built around exactly that shape.
Valtela runs $599 a year for the card and the nightly watch on your Google listing, and an extra card for a second counter is $79 a year; the full pricing breaks it down.
If you want the specific rule on a discount or a gift tied to a review, discount for a review goes deeper on that one practice. If the question is your own staff writing reviews, reviews from employees covers it, and review gating covers the satisfaction-filtering practice named above in full.
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.