Could you be breaking the review rules without knowing it?

So here are six of the most common unintentional breaches. For each one: what the rule is, how to check whether your own setup is caught by it, and how to put it right. The aim is not to alarm you. It is to let you self-correct, quietly, and come out cleaner than the operator who never looked.

One: sending only happy customers to leave a review

This is "review gating," and it is the most common one because tools build it in by default. A "how was it?" step routes the happy customers to your public review page and quietly diverts the unhappy ones to a private form. It is treated as deceptive under the new rules and breaches the major platforms' policies. Check: log into your review tool and look for any "satisfaction filter," "star threshold" or routing setting. Fix: send every customer the same public review link, keep a private complaint channel if you like, but never make the public link conditional on how they felt first.

Two: offering a reward without disclosing it

A discount, a prize draw or a freebie for a review is not automatically against the rules, but hiding it is, and conditioning it on a positive review is banned outright in some countries. Check: search your review-request emails for any reward, and ask whether the customer is told to mention it. Fix: offer any incentive to all reviewers regardless of rating, ask them to disclose it in the review, and never tie it to leaving five stars.

Three: reviews from you, your staff, or your family

A review by anyone connected to the business, posted as if they were an ordinary customer, is an undisclosed insider review and is prohibited everywhere we cover. The new business asking family to "help get things started" is the classic, well-meant version. Check: look through your own profiles for reviewers you know personally, especially clustered near your launch. Fix: do not solicit reviews from connected people unless they clearly disclose the connection, and label or remove any on your own site that do not.

Four: showing only your best reviews on your own website

A widget set to display only four and five-star reviews, presented as "our reviews," misrepresents the overall picture, and so does a star rating on your site calculated from a filtered subset. This one catches people because the filtering is done automatically by the widget, not by a deliberate choice. Check: find your review widget's settings and look for a minimum-star filter; check what any "rated 4.8" figure is actually based on. Fix: turn off the star filter, show a representative spread, and state how many reviews any rating is based on.

Five: buying followers or engagement

Purchased followers, likes or views create a false impression of your popularity, and that is now directly addressed in US federal law and reachable through advertising and consumer rules elsewhere. Check: compare your follower count to your real engagement, and check agency invoices for "social growth" line items. Fix: stop any purchase, do not cite bought numbers as social proof, and let the platforms purge the fakes.

Six: using AI to write your reviews or testimonials

The legal definition of a fake review is about whether it reflects a real person's genuine experience, not about how the words were typed. AI-generating a testimonial for an experience that did not happen is a fake review. A real customer using AI to help write up their own real experience is generally fine. Check: for every testimonial on your site, can you name the real customer and the real job behind it? Fix: remove anything composite or invented, and replace it with genuine customer words, used with permission.

What to do if you found a problem, and the limit

Finding one of these is not cause for panic, it is the first step to fixing it. Every regime here is oriented towards correction, and a business that self-identifies, fixes it, and keeps a note of having done so is in a completely different position from one that knew and did nothing. The limit, honestly: this is general information, not legal advice for your exact situation, and a few of these (especially anything touching employment or a live dispute) are worth a quick word with a professional. But the act of looking, and quietly putting it right, is the whole of what this page is asking.