When the "reputation software" you pay for breaks the law for you

The regulators have made this concrete. When one retailer used a third-party review tool that auto-published its four and five-star reviews while holding everything lower for an approval that never came, it was the retailer that paid millions, and the same regulator separately warned a row of named review-software vendors that selling these features puts them on notice too.

The line, and how to check your own setup

The line is precise. Asking every customer for an honest review is fine. It crosses into gating the moment access to your public review link is made conditional on the customer first saying they were happy. So audit your own setup: log into your review tool and look for any "satisfaction filter," "star threshold" or routing that sends positive and negative responders to different places. Check your website widget for a minimum-star filter that shows only your best reviews as if they were all of them. And read your agency's scope of work for anything that gates, filters or "protects" you from negatives.

"Done for you" means "done on your behalf"

The defence that an agency did it, not you, does not hold. The guidance is explicit that you are responsible for what a tool or agency does on your behalf, so a vendor's gating feature does not insulate you, it can simply add a second name to the problem. The fix is to require, in writing, that every customer gets the same review-link opportunity regardless of sentiment, and to turn off any star filter on your own site. The limit and the reassurance together: most review software is perfectly legitimate, the danger is a specific set of features, and a quick audit usually tells you in minutes whether yours is one of the safe ones.