Review Gating
Review gating is contacting only the clients you expect to say something good, and quietly skipping the rest. It turns an honest set of reviews into a curated one, which the major platforms’ own rules ban.
What it means
Review gating usually starts as a reasonable-sounding shortcut: check in with a client first, and only send the review link if they seem happy. The problem is what it does to the review page as a whole — it turns an honest sample into a curated one, which platforms like Google explicitly prohibit in their own review policies.
The fix isn’t asking every client the same glowing question — it’s asking privately first when you’re genuinely unsure how a job landed, fixing what you can, and asking for the review once that’s actually resolved, rather than quietly never asking that client at all.
You finish twenty jobs a month and privately feel good about seventeen of them. Gating means asking only those seventeen, and letting the other three go unasked. Over a year, that’s thirty-six clients never asked — not because they’d have said no, but because you decided for them.
Treating review gating as considerate rather than as what it actually is — a policy violation that also quietly buries the exact feedback that would tell you what to fix.
General information, not legal or tax advice — rates and rules vary by place; check yours. See our terms for the full version of this note.
See also
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