Review Gating
Review gating is contacting only the clients you expect to praise you and skipping the rest. It turns an honest set of reviews into a curated one. The major platforms ban it in their rules.
What it means
Review gating usually starts as a reasonable-sounding shortcut. You check in with a client first, and only send the review link if they seem happy. The problem is what this does to the review page as a whole. It turns an honest sample into a curated one. Platforms like Google explicitly prohibit this in their review policies.
The fix is to ask privately first when you are unsure how a job landed. Fix what you can. Ask for the review once that is resolved. Do not quietly skip that client. Asking every client the same glowing question is not the answer.
You finish twenty jobs a month and privately feel good about seventeen of them. Gating means asking only those seventeen and leaving the other three unasked. Over a year, that is thirty-six clients never asked. They might not have said no. You decided for them.
Treating review gating as considerate. It breaks platform policy, and it buries the 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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