AI search visibility tools all do the same four things. They put a fixed list of questions to the AI assistants on a schedule, record whether your business was named and which rivals were, repeat the run so you can compare this month against last, and turn the count into a percentage. What separates one from another is which assistants it asks, how often, whether it can ask per location rather than per brand, whether it checks that the facts in the answer are right, and whether it will show you the arithmetic behind the number.

Cloutly publishes this page, and Cloutly sells one of the tools on it. That is the disclosure, and it belongs up here rather than in a footnote. Every fact about another vendor comes from that vendor's own public pages, read on 6 September 2026, and where a vendor does not publish something this page says so instead of borrowing a figure from a comparison blog. There is no "cheaper than" anywhere below, because these products are not priced in the same unit and the arithmetic would be dishonest. The tools are listed alphabetically. If a vendor's site says something different today, the vendor's site is right and this page is stale.

The category also gets sold as AI visibility tools, GEO tools, AEO platforms or a ChatGPT visibility tracker. The labels move faster than the products do. Read the specification instead.

What AI search visibility tools actually do

The whole category is a sampler with a spreadsheet attached. It runs your prompts, stores the answers, and counts.

That matters because of what sits underneath. An assistant asked the same question twice can name a different set of businesses, so no tool here is reading a ranking. Each one samples something that moves and presents the average as a number, and a product reporting a stable rank is presenting a sample as a fact. AI visibility explained has the arithmetic, including why two tools pointed at the same business in the same week disagree. This page is the buying decision on top of it.

Read Google's guidance before you spend anything. Its guide to optimising for generative AI features carries a warning box: "Be wary of third-party tools that promise ranking success or claim to use 'internal' Google metrics. No third-party tool has access to our internal ranking or AI systems." That is not an argument against buying one. It is the standard to hold a vendor to.

Six questions that decide which AI search visibility tool you buy

Ask these on the call. Most can be answered from a pricing page before you book anything.

1. Which assistants does it ask?

Get the list, not the count. "10+ AI platforms" is a number that includes Grok, Meta and Mistral, and if your customers ask ChatGPT and Gemini then eight of the ten are padding.

Ask which assistants come with the plan you are quoted, because coverage is the most common upsell here. Profound's entry plan tracks ChatGPT and nothing else. AIclicks lets you pick three models from a list of eleven, and the fourth is the next tier up. Nightwatch is the exception, with the same six on every plan.

Then ask how the tool reaches the assistant. SE Ranking is the only one of the six that answers in public: "SE Ranking's AI Search Toolkit retrieves results through direct UI-based monitoring. It sends queries to AI platforms and captures the responses as a real user would see them." A model reached by API is not always the model your customer sees in the app.

2. How many prompts, how often, and how many samples of each?

Three numbers, and vendors usually publish the first two.

Prompt count is what you are buying. Fifty prompts is one business with a good list of questions; five hundred is a network. Frequency is how quickly you get a trend, and every tool below runs daily on some plan. The third number is the one to say out loud: how many times is each prompt asked, per assistant, per month? Vendors who publish a monthly response allowance beside the prompt count are telling you indirectly, so divide. Nightwatch's Starter is 50 prompts against 1,500 answers; Profound's is 50 against 1,500.

Watch the entry tiers on the platform products. Ahrefs includes AI prompts in every paid plan, but Lite carries five of them and 150 checks a month, which is a taste rather than a programme.

3. Does it work per location, or only per brand?

This question eliminates most of the category for a business with addresses, and nobody asks it in the demo.

A brand-level tool measures whether the assistants talk about your company. A location-level tool measures whether they name your Parramatta site when somebody in Parramatta asks. Passing the first tells you almost nothing about the second. Coastline Physio can be described warmly by every assistant on earth and still be absent from "best physio in Bondi" at nine of its eleven clinics.

So ask what the geographic unit is. It is usually nothing at all, a country, or a place you can name. Ahrefs bills a check as one prompt on one platform in one location. Nightwatch advertises prompts tracked in any location. Profound counts regions, and both published plans include one. AIclicks counts countries per project. A country is not a suburb, and for a service business the suburb is the whole question. AI search visibility for multi-location brands covers why the flagship gets named and the suburbs do not.

4. Does it check whether the answer is right, or only whether you were in it?

Being named in an answer that gives out a phone number you gave up two years ago is worse than not being named, because the customer rings the number.

Most tools here score presence and sentiment. Accuracy is rarer: of the six below, five document no accuracy check anywhere public, and ours checks one field, the phone number. Ask anyway, because the answer tells you what the product is for. If the tool does not check, the check is manual and belongs in your log. When AI gets your business details wrong is what you do once you find one.

5. Will it show you the denominator?

Every product here reports a share-of-voice or visibility percentage, and the percentage means nothing until you know what it is a percentage of.

Ahrefs publishes its definition plainly: AI Share of Voice is "the percentage of AI responses within your topic set that mention or cite your brand versus competitors". That sentence is usable, because it tells you the denominator is your topic set and therefore yours to change. Profound describes its method but publishes no formula behind any score.

The consequence is practical. Add three prompts your rivals happen to win and your score falls with nothing changed about your business. Ask what counts toward the number, whether custom prompts feed it, and whether movement is reported in percentage points or as a count of prompts that flipped. A score you cannot reconstruct is a score you cannot act on.

6. What does the price move with?

The billing units here are the plan, the check and the location. Per-plan pricing is a flat fee with a prompt allowance, predictable until you hit the ceiling. Per-check pricing, where one check is one prompt on one platform in one location, gets expensive at scale in a way you can forecast on a napkin. Per-location pricing tracks the thing you are measuring, which suits a network and is unnecessary for one shop.

Ask what the bill looks like at location twenty before you sign anything, and ask whether AI visibility sits on the tier you are being quoted or the one above it.

Best AI visibility tracking tools: what six vendors publish

Six tools, listed alphabetically. Five are products Google returns for this search; the sixth is ours. Every cell comes from the vendor's own public pages, read on 6 September 2026, and where a vendor does not publish something, this table says so.

Read the price column with the units in mind. One of these bills per check, one bills per location, and the rest bill per plan with a prompt allowance. The digits are not comparable and lining them up would mislead you.

Ahrefs

Brand Radar is the most transparent product here about how its numbers are built. Its FAQ defines the four metrics it leads with, and it says out loud where the index is weak: it "works best for established brands or topics with meaningful search demand, since the index is built on Ahrefs' keyword database and may have limited coverage for brands with little or no search volume". A suburban physiotherapy clinic is exactly that case.

It is also the only per-check model here. Plans run from US$129 a month (Lite) to US$1,499 (Enterprise, annual commitment required), each with a prompt allowance: five prompts and 150 checks on Lite, twenty and 600 on Advanced. Brand Radar sells standalone from US$199, and prompt packages start at US$50 for 2,500 checks, so a multi-location sweep prices out exactly. No contracts and no trial: asked about discounts, Ahrefs answers "We never run discounts" and points site owners at its free tier.

AIclicks

AIclicks scales on prompts and models rather than seats. Starter is US$59 a month for 30 tracked prompts, three models and one country per project; Pro is US$189 for 150 prompts, four models and unlimited countries; Business is US$499 for 300 prompts and six models. Prompts run daily on all three, and every plan publishes a monthly response allowance beside the prompt count.

Its FAQ is straight about what drives the bill: "Pricing is based on three things: the number of prompts you track, the number of AI engines monitored, and the volume of AI answers analyzed per month." Trials are three days, no credit card. The geographic unit is the country and the pricing page describes nothing smaller, which is fine for an agency and wrong for one business across eleven suburbs.

Cloutly

Our own scope, stated the way the product states it. Cloutly's AI search visibility asks ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity discovery questions such as "best {category} in {locality}" once a month, and records whether each location was named and which rivals were. There is an on-demand check across all three with a daily allowance. It does not sample Copilot or Google AI Mode.

The unit is the location. Each site gets its own questions and its own row, and the league table sorts worst first. Share of voice counts the standard questions only, and movement between sweeps is reported as flips: how many locations gained a mention and how many lost one. The fact check reads the phone number and nothing else. Results are a point-in-time sample of a system that is not deterministic, one sample each, so a re-ask can differ.

Pricing is published per location on our plans page, in the visitor's own currency, and reads US$39, US$55 and US$69 today, with 14 days free and no card. AI search visibility sits on the Growth plan, the US$69 one, where the inclusion line names ChatGPT and Gemini and the sweep also covers Perplexity. There is no content optimisation, no crawler analytics, no prompt research and no Grok, because this is one instrument inside a review management product rather than an AEO workbench.

Nightwatch

Nightwatch is a rank tracker that added AI prompts, and its location handling is why it is on this list. Every plan carries the same six AI platforms, and prompts are "tracked daily, in any location or language" across what the pricing page calls "107,000+ locations across 190+ countries".

Plans are Starter at €79 a month for 50 AI prompts and 1,500 AI answers, Professional at €159 for 150 and 4,500, and Agency at €399 for 500 and 15,000, all with a 14-day trial and no credit card. Sentiment and citation analysis sit on every plan, but the compare table puts white-label reports, API access and unlimited seats on Professional and above, which is worth reading against the "no per-seat fees" line at the top. Prices are in euros, and it is a rank tracker first, so you buy keyword tracking to get the prompts.

Profound

Profound is the most enterprise-shaped product here. Starter is US$99 a month and tracks ChatGPT only, with 50 prompts and 1,500 responses. Growth is US$399 for three answer engines, 100 prompts and 9,000 responses. Enterprise is custom and opens up to nine engines. Prompts run daily on all three tiers, and a "billed yearly" toggle offers two months free.

Its FAQ describes the method in one line: "Profound runs structured prompts across AI platforms daily, analyzing where and how your brand appears in responses, tracking citations, sentiment, ranking, and competitive presence." What it does not publish is the formula behind any score, so question five is live on the sales call.

The line to read carefully is Regions: one on Starter, one on Growth, custom on Enterprise. Languages are the same. For a national brand asking national questions, one region is right. For eleven clinics in eleven suburbs, you are in the Enterprise conversation before you start.

SE Ranking

SE Ranking sells AI visibility inside an SEO platform, and it is the most explicit of the six about collection method, quoted in question one. Its FAQ says the toolkit analyses ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Mode and AI Overviews. It is also the only vendor here that answers the question buyers actually have about their score: "There's no benchmark yet as AI search is too new for the industry."

Plans are Core at US$129 a month and Growth at US$279, both with 14-day trials and no credit card, listing 100 and 250 prompts to track daily. A separate AI Search add-on is US$89 a month for 200 prompts and competitor research; whether those prompts stack with the in-plan allowance or replace it is not stated, so confirm it on the call. The free checker gives five checks a day with no account. On location it says nothing a service business can use: no city, country or market unit at all.

Do the free checks before you buy anything

Two of these cost nothing and will tell you whether you need a subscription.

Google publishes AI performance data to the people who own the site. Its guide sends you to the Generative AI performance report in Search Console to see "how people are discovering your content through generative AI features on Google Search". It is first-party, it is free, and no third-party tool has better access to it than you do.

Then run the vendors' free checkers. Ahrefs runs one with no signup, and SE Ranking gives five checks a day without an account. Neither gives you a series, because one check is one sample, but in ten minutes they will tell you whether the assistants name you at all. If the answer is a flat no, buying a dashboard to watch a zero is an expensive way to feel busy. How AI search decides which local businesses get named is the work list then.

When a spreadsheet is enough

Use this test before you buy one.

You do not need a tool yet if you have one or two locations, you can write down eight prompts your customers would actually type, and you will spend twenty minutes on the first of every month. How to monitor AI search visibility is the procedure: eight prompts, a signed-out assistant, a fresh chat for each, and a seven-column log of whether you were named, which rivals were, what was cited and whether the facts were right. Doing it by hand has one advantage no dashboard matches, which is that you read the answers.

What breaks it is arithmetic. Eight prompts across three assistants is 24 answers a month at one location and 264 at eleven, and nobody does 264 by hand twice. The other thing that breaks it is a person: if the check depends on whoever remembers, it stops in the third month. When either is true you are buying automation, and you should price it as automation.

How to run a trial that tells you something

Two weeks is plenty if you decide beforehand what you are testing. Most trials here get spent admiring the dashboard.

1. Enter your real prompts on day one, not the ones the tool suggests. Discovery questions with no brand name in them, per location. A tool scored on brand-name prompts flatters everybody.
2. Check the geographic unit immediately. Set one prompt to a suburb rather than a country and see whether the answer changes. If it does not, the tool is not asking a local question.
3. Ask the same prompt twice in one day, once through the tool and once by hand. That is the sampling noise you will be reading all year, and you want its size before you start reacting to it.
4. Open one answer in full. If you cannot read the paragraph the assistant actually wrote, you are buying a number rather than a finding.
5. Ask support for the denominator in writing. A vendor who cannot answer that in a sentence has not decided.
6. Add a second location and see whether the price moves the way you expected and whether reporting rolls up or leaves you exporting.

On the last day, ask what you would have done differently because of the tool. If the honest answer is "nothing", the spreadsheet was the right product.

Questions people ask

What is the best AI search visibility tool? There is no single answer, because these tools are priced and scoped for different buyers. The question that narrows it fastest is whether you need per-location measurement. If you do, most of the category is out immediately, because it counts countries or nothing at all.

How do I check my AI visibility for free? Search Console's Generative AI performance report covers Google's AI features for a site you own. For the assistants, several vendors run free checkers, including Ahrefs with no signup and SE Ranking at five checks a day. And you can ask the assistants yourself: eight prompts, signed out, a fresh chat each time.

Are AI visibility tools accurate? They are accurate about what they observed, which is not the same as being accurate about your position. Each answer is one sample of a system that can reply differently minutes later, so a single result is evidence and a trend over months is a measurement.

How much do AI search visibility tools cost? The published monthly prices among the six above run from US$50 for a prompt package to US$1,499 for an enterprise plan, with one vendor priced in euros and ours priced per location, at US$69 a location a month for the tier that carries AI search visibility. Compare what a month of measurement costs at your number of locations, not the headline.

Do I need a GEO tool if I already do local SEO? Not necessarily, and Google's position is that the underlying work is the same. What a tool adds is the observation: whether the assistants name you, at which addresses, and what they are reading when they do.

To edit your Google Business Profile, search for your business while signed in to the account that manages it, select Edit profile, change the field and select Save. In the Google Maps app, tap Business at the bottom right, then Edit profile. Google does not publish the change straight away. "We review your changes before we update them live on your profile", and "Edits usually take up to 10 minutes to review, but sometimes it can take up to 30 days."

Hours, phone and website usually reappear within the hour. Name, address and category are the three that can send you back through verification, so plan those changes. The clicks are quick. The wait and whatever Google does with the change come afterwards.

If a guide tells you to sign in to a Google My Business dashboard, it is out of date. That is why so many walkthroughs point you to menus you cannot find.

Where you edit a Google Business Profile now

There are two places to do it, and both work from your own listing. In Google Search, sign in with the account that manages the profile and search your business name. A panel opens above the results with Edit profile on it. In the Google Maps app, tap Business at the bottom right, then Edit profile. Either way you finish on Save (Edit your Business Profile).

Business Profile Manager at business.google.com is still live, but it manages a set of profiles rather than edits a single one.

Which fields you can edit, and which ones need verification

Everything below sits under Edit profile. The right-hand column tells you how carefully to approach each change.

Name, address and category help Google decide that a business is real and matches its description, so changing one reopens that question. The rest is detail about a business Google has already accepted.

Names have another trap. Google wants the name that "reflect[s] your business's real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery, and as known to customers". It rules out taglines, store codes, trademark symbols, fully capitalised words, opening hours, phone numbers and location descriptors such as "Holiday Inn (I-93 at Exit 2)" (Guidelines for representing your business on Google). Adding your suburb or your main service to the name is the most common rejected edit, and it risks the whole profile: Google "reserves the right to suspend access to Business Profiles on Google or other Google Services to individuals or businesses that violate these guidelines".

A real rebrand is narrower than most people expect. Google allows a name change on the same profile only where "the proper nouns and services described in the business name remain unchanged and the business category remains unchanged". Anything larger counts as a new business: you mark the existing profile closed and create a new one, and the reviews stay on the old profile. Removing a business from Google covers closing one properly.

How to change business hours on Google

Customers use your hours the same day, so this is the field to get right.

1. Open your Business Profile and select Edit profile, then Hours.
2. Next to "Hours", select Edit, then Open with main hours.
3. Tick the box next to each day you are open. A day you leave unticked shows as closed.
4. Set the times with the dropdowns. For a day you trade around the clock, select Opens at, then 24 hours.
5. Select Save.

A third setting is easy to miss. Open with no main hours publishes the profile with no hours on it at all. That suits a business whose hours genuinely vary, but not one that has not filled them in yet (Edit your business hours).

While you are there, check whether the kitchen shuts before the venue or delivery runs later than the counter. Those details belong in More hours, not your main hours.

Special hours and holiday hours

Special hours are the tool for a one-off: hours that change "for a brief period of time, like for a special event", set "so that your regular hours don't change".

Select Edit profile, then Hours, then Edit next to "Special hours". Pick or add the date, mark the day closed or enter the times, and save. The ceiling is six days: "You can set special hours if your business temporarily adjusts its hours of operation or remains closed for up to 6 days in a row." Longer, or for a period you cannot put an end date on, and Google wants the profile marked Temporarily closed instead (How to set Special hours).

Public holidays are separate. On the holidays Google tracks for your country, "a warning may appear on your Business Profile that tells users your business hours might differ", whether or not anything about your day changes (About holidays on Google). Confirm the date to clear it. Do the next twelve months in one sitting.

How to update business information on Google without triggering a re-verification

Order matters when you have several things to change. Do the safe fields first and on their own: hours, phone, website, description, photos, attributes. They go into review and come back without moving anything else. Then take name, address and category one at a time, and only when you can prove the new detail from the public record. That is exactly what an appeal will ask you for.

Update the rest of the internet before you press Save. If the old number still sits on your website, you will have to make the edit twice.

How long does a Google Business Profile edit take to show?

Google reviews everything: "Edits that you make to your verified Business Profile are reviewed to ensure they follow our guidelines", and the published window is "Edits usually take up to 10 minutes to review, but sometimes it can take up to 30 days" (Understand what happens to your Business Profile edits). Most hours and phone changes land in minutes. Address changes, name changes and edits on a profile that has been suspended before are where the long tail lives.

Every edit ends in one of three states. Accepted means it is live. Not approved means "Google might not approve changes if it can't confirm its accuracy". Pending means it is still in review. Google's Check your edit status tool tells you which, so you do not have to refresh your own search result and guess. Sign in to the account that manages the profile first.

Google Business Profile edit not showing: what to check

Work down this list in order.

1. It is still pending. Anything under thirty days is inside Google's published window, however unreasonable that feels. Check the status. Resubmitting the same change speeds nothing up.
2. It was not approved. Google could not confirm the change was accurate. Most common on names, addresses and phone numbers, and appealable.
3. Google changed it back. A different thing from a rejection, and covered below.
4. You are editing a duplicate. Where two profiles exist for one site, your edit is live on the one nobody sees. Multiple locations with the same name, and how to fix a duplicate covers clearing them.
5. The profile is suspended. Nothing publishes from a suspended profile, and a keyword-stuffed name is a frequent cause.
6. You are looking at the wrong thing. Search your exact name and suburb, not a category term, and check on a device you did not edit from.

When an edit is rejected, and how to appeal

Rejected edits to your name, category, address, phone and website can be appealed, but the route depends on where the business trades. In the UK and the EEA it is Google's appeals tool. Everywhere else it is the contact form (Appeal rejected business information edits).

The evidence matters most. Google wants official business registration, a business licence, tax certificates or utility bills, and it wants "the business name and address match the profile you want to make an appeal for". A power bill in a director's name at a home address does not match a shopfront profile. That mismatch is why appeals fail.

A few details catch people out. You get sixty minutes from submitting the appeal to attach the evidence. "Appeal reviews and decisions can take up to 5 business days", and a second appeal for the same issue slows the queue rather than the reverse. Do not create a fresh profile for the same business while the appeal runs, however tempting that gets.

When Google changes your profile back

An edit can disappear without being rejected. Google updates profiles on its own: "Google gathers info from different sources, like user reports and licensed content", and "If sources report that your profile info is incorrect or outdated, Google may update your profile." Members of the public suggest edits on Maps. A data provider can supply hours you never entered.

You can see this in the editor. The text colour is the tell.

Change it back and save. The caveat is Google's own: "You can't manage all Google updates through your Business Profile." When a change keeps returning, correct the source instead. Usually it is your website footer, a directory with an old number, or a Facebook Page nobody has opened since the fit-out.

Editing several locations at once

At one site this is a ten-minute job. At twenty it is a different job, because every risky field multiplies and hours drift one location at a time.

Business Profile Manager is where that work happens, with business groups for access and a bulk upload spreadsheet for adding and updating profiles at volume. Managing several Google locations sets out the groups, the spreadsheet and the ownership roles, and adding a business to Google Maps covers any site not properly on Google yet.

The sequencing matters. Say Coastline Physio changes its phone number across nine clinics and Emma works through the profiles as she gets time. For that fortnight some clinics are right and some are not, and nobody can tell you which. Decide the new value once, hold it somewhere that is not a profile, and publish everywhere from that record.

Keeping the same facts on every other site

Customers check more than your Google profile, and Google does too. Hours on Yelp, a phone number on Facebook and an address in your website footer all affect how much Google trusts the version you just typed. Keeping them matching is listing consistency, sometimes called NAP consistency, and it is a subject of its own: what it actually does for your rankings, and the audit to run across all eight sources.

That single record is the practical answer. Cloutly's listings management works that way: one record per location carrying name, phone, website, description, address and hours, published to Google Business Profile and to the Facebook Page only after you approve a preview of the exact change, then checked weekly against Google's public view, Yelp, Facebook and TripAdvisor.

FAQ

Can I change my business name on Google without losing my reviews?

Only if the change is minor: the proper nouns and services in the name stay the same and the category does not change. Anything bigger counts as a new business, which means closing the existing profile and creating a new one. The reviews stay with the old profile.

Do I need to verify again if I only change my phone number?

No. Verification comes into it on the name, the address and the category. Phone, website, hours, description and photos are reviewed, but they do not reopen verification.

Why does Google keep changing my hours back?

Because something else is telling Google your hours are different. Google updates profiles from user reports and licensed data, and shows those changes in blue in the editor. Fix the source that disagrees with you, then set the hours again.

Can I still edit my profile in the old Google My Business dashboard?

No. That dashboard is gone. A single profile is edited in Google Search and the Google Maps app, and business.google.com now handles sets of profiles.

Review monitoring is knowing a review landed, on any profile, without going to look for it. You set it up by switching on the notification each site already offers, adding a standing check for the sites that send nothing, and deciding in advance who acts when one arrives. For a single location with two or three profiles, that is an afternoon of work.

Verified 6 September 2026 against Google's help pages on managing your notifications, managing customer reviews, duplicate profiles and creating a Google Alert, plus the Google Alerts options panel itself; Yelp's notification settings article; Tripadvisor's guide to Management Responses; Facebook's pages on seeing your Page's recommendations and turning Recommendations on or off; and Meta's pages on business notifications and ratings and reviews in Meta Business Suite. Quotes are the platforms' own words.

What review monitoring is, and what it is not

Online review monitoring is the same job with a longer name. A review tracker is software that does it for you. Whatever you call it, the job is the same: get a review in front of someone while they can still do something about it.

It is not responding, and it is not asking. Monitoring is one of the four jobs in review management, and it sets the speed limit for the other three. A reply written eleven days late is a reply nobody reads.

Turn on what each site already sends you

Start with the free notifications. They cover most of what arrives, but each setting lives somewhere different and each has a hole worth knowing about before you rely on it.

Google Business Profile

Google's notification settings sit on the profile itself. From Google Search, open your Business Profile, select More, then Notifications, find the notification you want and turn it on or off beside it. In the Google Maps app the path is different: tap Business at the bottom right, then Notifications at the top right.

The Manage your notifications page sorts them into five groups: Account updates, Features and tips, Customer activity, Business info alerts, and Bookings and requests. Reviews sit under Customer activity, which Google describes as "Alerts when customers leave new reviews or add photos". Switch that one on and Google will tell you a review arrived. Read the caveat printed on the same page while you are there: "Even if you turn off some notifications, you may still get important updates from Google." Turning things off is less final than it looks.

Then there are three gaps, and none of them is obvious from the settings screen.

The settings are per profile. Ten locations means ten passes, ten chances to miss one, and no screen anywhere that shows you which profiles you have already done.

Notifications announce arrivals, not edits. Google's review help page says a customer "can still change their review after reading your reply", and that "if they change their review, the date on their review will change to show when the latest update was made". A four star quietly rewritten down to one star appears as a fresh date on something you read a fortnight ago and stopped watching.

And a review on a profile you do not manage never reaches you at all. Duplicate and auto-created profiles are common, and Google's duplicate profiles page warns that when two are merged "their reviews are combined, but replies to reviews may be lost". Finding the duplicate late costs you the replies you already wrote.

Facebook

On a Facebook Page they are not called reviews. They are Recommendations, and they live on the Reviews tab at the top of the Page. Facebook's help page gives the path plainly: click your profile photo, click See all profiles, switch into the Page, then "click Reviews at the top of your Page".

Before you monitor anything, check there is something to monitor. Recommendations can be switched off for a Page entirely, under Settings and privacy, then Settings, then Page and tagging, then the "Allow others to view and leave reviews on your Page?" toggle. Facebook's own wording is that turning Recommendations off "will disable Recommendations and remove the rating and reviews from your Page". A Page that has looked quiet for a year is sometimes a Page with that toggle off.

Facebook is the one platform here with no documented review alert. Meta sorts business notifications into three categories, Accounts, Ads and Pages, and describes the Pages group as covering "interactions on your business page, like comments and likes". Recommendations are not named in it. Meta Business Suite does have a Ratings and reviews tool under All tools, but Meta's page for it says those ratings come from customers who interacted with your ads, which is a different thing from a recommendation left on your Page. Until Meta documents an alert for the second one, treat Facebook as a profile you open on a schedule rather than one that chases you.

Yelp

Yelp does email owners, and the setting lives on the website only. From your Yelp for Business account, open the Language & Notifications page, tick the notifications you want, choose an email language, and click Save Settings.

The line worth reading twice is Yelp's own: "Please note you can't change your email notifications from the Yelp for Business app." The app carries separate push switches, under More then Notification Settings, and Yelp attaches a warning to those steps: "If you have access to multiple business pages, you'll need to follow the steps below for each business page location." Same trap as Google, different building.

Yelp's mail comes from no-reply@yelp.com, and the first item on Yelp's own troubleshooting list is to search every folder, Spam and Trash included, for messages from that address. Do that before you conclude Yelp has gone quiet.

Tripadvisor

Tripadvisor's owner email is opt-in and it is buried. Click your profile icon at the top right of the Tripadvisor homepage, select Account info, hover over Settings and click Subscriptions, then on the Emails for Owners tab make sure Subscribed is selected next to Reviews & Questions.

Tripadvisor says the subscription "will help you monitor reviews as they come in", which is the closest any of these four gets to describing monitoring as a job.

Replying happens in the free Management Center. Claim the property at tripadvisor.com/Owners, reach the centre through your profile icon and My Business, then use the Respond to Reviews card. Reviews there "can be filtered by response status, bubble rating, date and language", and the response-status filter is the most useful monitoring view on the site: a standing list of everything you have not answered.

The gap here is on the way out rather than the way in. Your reply is not live when you press submit. The status becomes "Response Pending", and Tripadvisor says "the majority of Management Responses will be reviewed and posted within a few business days". You cannot edit a response once it is up, only delete it and submit a new one. Build that delay into anything you promise a customer on the phone.

Google Alerts watches your name, not your reviews

Set an alert for the business name, and a second for the name plus the word review. Two minutes, and worth having, as long as you know what it is.

Google's Create an alert page is precise about the scope: you "can get emails when new results for a topic show up in Google Search". New results means pages entering the search index. A review posted on your Google Business Profile is not a new page in the index, so no alert will tell you it landed.

What alerts do catch is everything happening away from your own profiles: a forum thread, a local news mention, a complaint site, a directory that copied your listing and started collecting reviews of its own. Anything that arrives claiming a review landed is worth checking against the profile itself, because the negative review email scam is built on that message.

Click Show options before you create one. How often offers As-it-happens, At most once a day, and At most once a week, and it defaults to once a day. For a business name, leave it there. As-it-happens turns one busy news day into twenty emails, and an alert you have filtered into a folder is an alert you have switched off.

The weekly check, once you have more than one location

Notifications thin out as profiles multiply, so a group needs a standing check as well. Fifteen minutes on the same morning each week covers it.

1. Open the unanswered view on every site that has one: Tripadvisor's response-status filter, and your Google reviews list sorted newest first.
2. Write down the count of new reviews per location. The count is the point. A location that got none is a finding, and it vanishes inside a group total.
3. Look at the reviews you have already replied to for changed dates. An edited Google review carries the date of its latest update and announces nothing.
4. Once a month, search your own business name in Google Maps for every suburb you trade in, looking for duplicate or unclaimed profiles quietly collecting reviews.
5. Confirm the Facebook Reviews tab is still switched on, and that the Yelp notification address still belongs to somebody who works there. Both fail silently.
6. Send each location's new reviews to the person who was there. Head office cannot write the reply that names the real Tuesday.

Once that check is running, read the reviews in a batch to count recurring themes by location and decide what needs changing.

Where this stops working is arithmetic rather than discipline. Drayhill Dental runs six clinics, each with Google, Facebook and a booking platform. That is eighteen profiles, and at two minutes each it is a thirty-six minute Monday, every Monday, which is the first thing dropped in a week that goes wrong. Coastline Physio, one site and three profiles, will still be doing this by hand in five years and will be fine.

When a review monitoring tool earns its place

A tool starts to make sense when any of these is true:

• More than one location.
• More than about three profiles collecting reviews.
• Reviews arriving faster than anyone checks, so replies go out days late.
• More than one person needing to see the same review, which is where forwarded email starts to fail.

Below that, a tool is a paid substitute for a habit, and the habit is not hard.

The promise every tool makes is all your reviews in one place, and that really is the whole of it: one list instead of a tab per profile, a count per location, and a record of who replied and when. Cloutly does that across 39 review sites: every location in one inbox, filterable down to one, and new reviews appear on their own.

Be sceptical of two things while you shop. No tool makes a review arrive sooner than the site publishes it, so treat any promise built on speed as marketing. And walk away from any product offering to show your review link only to customers who rate you well first. That is review gating, and Google's Maps content policy tells merchants not to "Discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers".

The first hour after a bad review

Monitoring only pays off if something happens next.

1. Read it twice, then check it. Find the date, the service and the name, and look them up in your booking system before you accept the account as written or dispute it.
2. Decide whether it breaks the site's rules. Most bad reviews do not, and the test is narrower than owners expect: see how to remove a Google review. Report it if it qualifies, then carry on as though it will stay, because most reports fail.
3. Reply for the next reader, not the reviewer. The person who wrote it has decided. The next forty people reading your profile have not. Worked replies are in our 1-star review response examples, and the same principle covers the good ones in our review response examples.
4. Do not send it in the first ten minutes. An hour is fine. A day is fine. A fortnight is not.
5. Tell the location, then log the reason. One review about the wait is a bad Tuesday. Three in a month about the wait is an operations item, and that is the return on monitoring at all.

One thing that is not a monitoring failure: a review a customer swears they left that you cannot find. Google holds, delays and drops reviews for reasons of its own, listed in Google review not showing up.

Frequently asked questions

Does Google email you when someone leaves a review?

It can. Review alerts sit under Customer activity in the notification settings on your Business Profile, reached through Google Search or the Business tab in the Maps app, and they cover new reviews and new photos. The setting is per profile, so it has to be switched on for each location you manage.

What is a review tracker?

A review tracker is software that collects reviews from the sites your business appears on, puts them in one list, and records which ones have been answered. Review tracking, review monitoring and online review monitoring all describe the same job; the wording varies by vendor.

How do you monitor reviews across multiple locations?

By hand, you turn on each site's notification for each location, then run one weekly check that counts new reviews per location and lists everything unanswered. That holds to roughly ten or fifteen profiles. Past that most groups move to software, because a per-location count stops being visible in a shared inbox.

Can you monitor online reviews for free?

For a single location, yes. Google, Yelp and Tripadvisor all offer free owner notifications, Facebook has a Reviews tab you can check, and Google Alerts covers mentions away from your profiles. What free will not give you is one list, a count per location, or a record of who replied.

Do reviews affect what AI assistants say about your business?

Your public profiles and the reviews on them are part of what an assistant has to work with when someone asks it for a business like yours, so what the assistants say is worth checking alongside what the review sites show. That is a separate check from a review notification, and it is covered in AI search for local businesses.

To merge Google Business Profiles, open the duplicate in Google Maps, select Suggest an edit, then Place is closed or not here, then Duplicate of another place, then Submit. Google assesses the request and, if it agrees, one profile stops showing while the other survives.

That is the whole mechanism. There is no merge button and no screen where you pick which profile wins. Google's own line is that "all merge requests are subject to review", and that when two profiles do merge, "their reviews are combined, but replies to reviews may be lost" (Resolve duplicate profiles & ownership issues). So the question worth answering is which of the three routes below fits the duplicate in front of you, and what each one costs.

What Google does with a duplicate Business Profile

Google does not fold two records into one. It decides one of them should not be there and takes it out of circulation: "If a profile is considered a duplicate, it won't show on Google Search or Maps."

Google flags a profile for three reasons, in its own words: a verified profile already exists for the same business, multiple profiles share the same address, or multiple profiles exist for the same business offering different services. The last one catches people out. A clinic with one profile for physio and another for podiatry at a single address has two duplicates, not two services, and Google's instruction is to list the services on one profile instead of splitting them.

Is it a duplicate, or two listings Google allows?

Google permits more than one profile at one address in specific cases. Filing a merge on one of those wastes a week and can cost you reviews.

Google's test for two businesses at one address is that they are "distinct businesses with different names and clearly visible differences in signage", and it names what counts: "locations with multiple brands, rebranded businesses, departments within other businesses, or individual practitioners at a shared location." Departments have to earn it. The name has to differ from the main business, the category has to differ from the main business and from every other department, and there is usually a separate customer entrance. "Walmart Vision Center" qualifies. The Apple products section of a Best Buy does not (Guidelines for representing your business on Google).

Practitioners are the rule that dental, legal and allied health groups get wrong. Where several public-facing practitioners work at one location, the organisation holds a profile for the location and each practitioner holds their own, titled with the practitioner's name and not the organisation's. Where one practitioner is the only public-facing one at a branded site, Google wants a single shared profile named [brand/company]: [practitioner name]. Nobody gets a second profile for a second specialisation: "A practitioner shouldn't have multiple Business Profiles to cover all of their specializations."

How to merge Google Business Profiles, step by step

Which route you take depends on who can sign in to the duplicate.

Route 1: both profiles are in your account

If you created the second profile and nothing on it is worth keeping, do not send a merge request. Remove it.

1. Go to the duplicate profile, signed in to the Google account that owns it.
2. Select More, then Business Profile settings.
3. Select Remove Business Profile, then Remove profile content and managers.
4. Select Continue, then Remove, then Done.

Google's line on doing this to a duplicate you created yourself is that you "can remove it without affecting your verified listing", with a warning in the next sentence: "When you remove a duplicate profile, all content and linked managers will be removed, so make sure to remove the correct profile" (Resolve duplicate profiles & ownership issues). Only a primary owner can do it, and "new owners and managers must wait 7 days before they can remove profile content or managers" (Remove a Business Profile from your Google Account).

Removal is not a merge, and the reviews are where the difference shows. What disappears is your side of the profile: "any posts, photos, videos, and review replies by owners and managers are permanently removed." What stays is everything customers wrote, because "user-generated content and review remains." So the reviews sit on a place record you can no longer answer on, and the place itself may well stay up: removing all ownership and content "doesn't guarantee that the business won't show up on Maps and Search." If the duplicate carries reviews, take the next route instead.

Route 2: the duplicate is on Maps and nobody manages it

Google builds place records from its own sources, and any signed-in person can add one, so the second listing often has no owner at all.

1. Open Google Maps and find the duplicate.
2. Select Suggest an edit, then Place is closed or not here.
3. Under Operating status, select Duplicate of another place.
4. Select Submit.

Anyone can file this, which is why it works on a listing left behind by a previous owner. Google's help pages write the second step as "Place closed or not here"; the desktop dialog says "Place is closed or not here" and puts the duplicate option under Operating status, so you are in the right place either way.

Check two things before you file. The form is not available everywhere, since "you can only edit business attributes in select countries and regions" (Mark a place reopened or closed on Google Maps). And it gives you nowhere to name the survivor, so make sure the profile you are keeping is the fuller and better reviewed of the two.

Route 3: someone else has verified the duplicate

An old agency, a franchisee or a manager who left still holds it. You cannot merge a profile you cannot reach.

Go to business.google.com/add, enter the business name and address, pick it from the list, then select Request access and submit the form (Request ownership of a Business Profile). After that, "the current profile owner has 3 days to respond." Approved, you get an email and can manage the profile. Denied, you get an email and "can appeal the denial", and you can still suggest an edit in Maps. No response, and "you have the option to claim the profile", with the caveat Google attaches to it: "the option to claim a profile isn't always available" (Resolve duplicate profiles & ownership issues).

Start this one early. Three days is only three days once somebody is actually reading the email.

What happens to your reviews when profiles merge

This is what decides which route you should have taken.

A merge combines the reviews, and the catch sits in the same sentence: "replies to reviews may be lost." Your written responses are what is at risk, not the reviews themselves.

Removing a profile does not do that. Take a duplicate out of your account and its reviews stay exactly where they are, on a place record you have just given up the ability to answer on.

You also do not get to choose which rating survives. If the duplicate carries eleven one-star reviews, they arrive with everything else, and the combined average is the combined average.

So copy your replies out of the profile that is about to disappear, then request the merge rather than removing the duplicate, because the merge is the only route that carries the reviews across. If reviews look missing once it is done, why a Google review is not showing up covers what Google filters and how long it holds one.

How long a merge takes

Google publishes timings for some of this and none for the merge itself. Any page quoting a firm number of business days is quoting an average somebody measured.

Those four come from, in order, Understand what happens to your Business Profile edits, Edit place information in Google Maps, Resolve duplicate profiles & ownership issues and Appeal Business Profile content and profile restrictions.

While something is under review, leave it alone. Google asks you not to submit multiple appeals for the same issue before a decision, and not to "create a new Business Profile for the same business while your appeal is under review".

When Google refuses to merge

Google's condition is that "the profiles must represent the same business and should have the same info", so a request filed while the two listings show different names, addresses or phone numbers fails. Fix the survivor first, then file.

The opposite failure is worse. Google merges two profiles that should have stayed apart, and a practice and a practitioner, or two tenants sharing a suite, collapse into one listing. The way back is an appeal, not a new profile: contact Google Business Profile support and appeal the duplicate status. Expect to prove it. "If both businesses serve customers at the same location, you'll be asked to provide evidence of permanent signage that clearly shows both businesses." Photograph the signage while you are standing in front of it, not six weeks later from memory.

Duplicates across twenty locations

One duplicate is an afternoon. Twenty locations is a queue, because duplicates appear faster than anyone files suggestions against them. Almost all of them come from two habits.

Relocation is the first. Google is blunt about it: "If your business relocates, do not create a new Business Profile for the new location. Instead, update the existing profile with the new address." Open a replacement profile when a site moves and you have stranded a listing that kept the reviews.

Access is the second. Somebody at a site claims their own location because nobody ever gave them a login, and now the brand has a profile it does not control.

Audit before you file anything. Search each location by name and suburb, then by street address, and write down every place record that comes back, the unowned ones included. Rank each pair on review count, review recency, photos and verification. The profile with 180 reviews wins even when the other one has the better description, because a description can be rewritten and 180 reviews cannot.

Then work in one direction. Fix the survivor so the two records match, file the duplicate suggestions second, and go back and check rather than assuming. Multiple Google locations with the same name covers the naming half of the same problem.

How to stop the duplicate coming back

A merged duplicate stays merged. A new one takes a minute to create, and almost nobody creates one on purpose.

Hand a location over instead of deleting it: transfer primary ownership and the reviews and the history stay with the site. Own every location from an account the business will still control in five years, which rules out a personal Gmail and the agency's login. And look at each location's public listing on a schedule, because a duplicate created by a customer or a data aggregator turns up in the wild long before it turns up in a dashboard.

Under all of that is one record per location that everything publishes from. Cloutly's listings management works that way: name, phone, website, address and hours go to Google Business Profile and the Facebook Page only after you approve a preview of the exact change, and Google's public view, Yelp, Facebook and TripAdvisor are re-checked against that record weekly.

When you tidy up the survivor afterwards, editing a Google Business Profile covers which fields send you back through verification. Adding a business to Google Maps is the one to read for a site that is not properly on Google yet, and removing a business from Google for one that has closed.

FAQ

Can you merge two Google Business Profiles yourself?

No. You can ask. The request goes through Suggest an edit, then Place is closed or not here, then Duplicate of another place on Google Maps, and Google decides. There is no merge control in Business Profile Manager.

Will I lose my reviews if I merge?

The reviews are combined. Your replies may not survive, so copy anything worth keeping before you file. Removing a duplicate instead of merging it leaves that profile's reviews where they are, on a place record you no longer manage.

How long does a Google Business Profile merge take?

Google does not publish a timeline for merges. It publishes the neighbouring ones: an edit to a profile you own is reviewed in "up to 10 minutes" and sometimes "up to 30 days", the owner of a profile you have asked to take over gets 3 days, and an appeal takes "up to 5 business days". A specific number of business days for a merge is somebody's average, not a Google figure.

Google merged two businesses that are not the same. How do I undo it?

Contact Google Business Profile support and appeal the duplicate status. Both businesses have to be eligible and distinct from one another, and if they serve customers at the same location you will be asked for photographs of permanent signage showing both names.

A negative review email scam is a message that looks like a notification from a review site and is not one. It arrives by email or text, says a customer has left you a bad review, and puts a link in front of you. Two sorts of people send them: phishers who want the password to your Google or Facebook account, and sellers who want to pitch you a listing or a "reputation repair" service for a review that was never there. You can settle it in under a minute, and you do not need the link to do it. Open your profile yourself and look.

Verified 6 September 2026 against Yelp's page on scams impersonating Yelp, Tripadvisor's equivalent, Meta's phishing page, Google's help pages on fraudulent calls and texts, protecting your Business Profile, reporting phishing email and review extortion, and the FTC's Scams and Your Small Business. None of it is legal advice.

What the negative review email scam actually is

There is no single sender behind these. The message is a template, and it works because it lands on the one thing an owner will open at 11pm without thinking. They come in two shapes.

Phishing. The message says you have a new one-star review and asks you to sign in to read it or reply to it. The link goes to a page built to look like a Google, Facebook or Yelp login. What the sender wants is the password, and behind the password the Business Profile or the Page. Google's version of the warning is short: "Beware of phone calls, e-mails, or text messages from people who offer to help with your Business Profile in exchange for money", and "Google will never ask for One Time Password (OTP) or Personal Identification Number (PIN)."

Lead generation dressed as a notification. The message says you have a negative review or a broken listing, and offers to fix it, remove it, or upgrade you to a paid directory profile. Often the directory is one you have never heard of, with a name that borrows a familiar one. The FTC names the end of that funnel: "Scammers try to fool you into paying for nonexistent advertising or a listing in a phony business directory." Google files the same thing under the scams that trade on its brand, as Google Maps/SEO Fake Invoices and the Google Top Placement/SEO Scam.

Both share a tell that has nothing to do with the wording. A real notification describes something you can go and verify on the platform in ten seconds. With a fake, the link is meant to be the only way you can check.

How to tell a real review notification from a fake

Start with what each platform publishes about itself, because that is the only sender information you can lean on. Three of the four publish a domain rule. Google does not publish an allow-list of the addresses its Business Profile mail comes from, so for Google the answer is always the profile rather than the headers.

A domain rule is weaker than it looks, and both Yelp and Tripadvisor say so on the same pages that give the rule. Yelp's wording: scammers use "a tactic called 'spoofing' where they will make it seem as if their email or website is coming from a known, trusted source, typically by using a similar sounding domain. For example, yeIp.com, spelled with a capital 'i', is not a legitimate Yelp website." Tripadvisor's example is tripadvisero1.com. A capital I and a lowercase L are the same shape in most fonts, so skim-reading a sender address is not a test.

Yelp's page in September 2026. The domain rule is the fourth bullet; the reason it is not enough on its own is the fifth.

Then read the rest of the message. These are the tells that hold up:

1. The link does not go where the text says. Hover over it on a computer, or press and hold on a phone, and read the actual destination. If the visible text says Google and the destination is anything else, stop there.
2. It asks you to sign in. Gmail's guidance is worth memorising: "If you're signed in to an account, emails from Google won't ask you to enter the password for that account." If you have already clicked, the instruction is to not enter your information and to "go directly to the website you want to use" instead.
3. There is an attachment. Yelp says legitimate Yelp communications "will not require you to open ZIP file attachments, create accounts on other sites, or download programs other than the Yelp app(s)". Tripadvisor says the same about ZIP files.
4. It arrived on WhatsApp or Telegram. Yelp and Tripadvisor both say they never use either. Google does send WhatsApp and RCS messages in some countries, and the tell is the blue verification tick: its verified WhatsApp account is called "Google Maps", sometimes with a country name after it, and an RCS sender shows as "Google".
5. It asks for money, or offers you some. Nobody at a review site will ask you to pay to change a rating, and nobody at a review site will pay you to leave one.
6. It is written to rush you. The FTC puts this first among scammers' tactics: "Scammers create a sense of urgency, intimidation, and fear." A genuine review notification carries no deadline, because a review is not a deadline.

The "reputation repair" pitch about a review that does not exist

There is a quieter version of this that catches careful people, because there is no malware and no fake login. Somebody emails or calls, says they have noticed a damaging one-star review on your listing, and offers to have it taken down for a fee. Sometimes they claim to work with Google. Sometimes they send a screenshot. The FTC gives it a heading of its own, Changing Online Reviews: "Some scammers claim they can replace negative reviews of your product or service, add positive reviews, or boost your scores on ratings sites. However, posting fake reviews is illegal."

Two facts kill the pitch. The first is that you can go and look. Open the profile and count. If the review they described is not there, the conversation is over, and it is worth keeping the email, because a claim about a review that does not exist is a useful thing to have in writing.

The second is that there is no paid channel into a review team. Google documents a report, one appeal per review and a legal request, and none of them are for sale. Yelp puts it flatly: "There has never been any amount of money someone can pay Yelp to alter reviews or ratings." Our guide to removing a Google review sets out the routes that do exist, and we went through what a legitimate removal firm can and cannot do in our look at Removify.

One case is different and needs a different response. If the one-star reviews really did land, in a burst, and then a demand for money arrived, that is review extortion rather than a scam email, and Google runs a separate report form for it.

The first instruction on that page is not to negotiate: "Do not engage with or pay the malicious individuals. This can encourage further attempts and doesn't guarantee the removal of reviews."

We walk through the whole pattern, and the evidence a report needs, in how to spot a fake review.

What to do when one of these lands

1. Do not click, do not reply and do not open the attachment. Replying confirms the address is live and staffed.
2. Open the profile yourself, by typing the address or using a bookmark or the app, rather than the link or a search advertisement. Review monitoring is what makes that check quick.
3. If the review is not there, report the message as phishing. In Gmail, open the message, click More next to Reply, then Report phishing. Meta asks you to forward it to phish@fb.com. Tripadvisor asks you to forward anything claiming to be from Tripadvisor to help@tripadvisor.com. Yelp asks you to contact its Support team.
4. Report it to the regulator too. It takes a minute, and as the FTC puts it, "your report can help stop the scam". In the US that is ReportFraud.ftc.gov. In the UK, forward the email to report@phishing.gov.uk, the address the NCSC publishes. In Australia, report it to Scamwatch.
5. If somebody already clicked and typed a password, change it everywhere it was reused, turn on two-step verification, then check who has access to the profile. Google's own hardening advice is to claim every location, because "unclaimed locations will make your business more vulnerable and prone to hijacks", and to keep the access list short. Watch for the follow-up as well: an emailed request to become an owner or manager of the profile should not be approved "unless you know the individual requesting access".

If the review turns out to be real

Sometimes you open the profile and it is sitting there. Answer it in public, once, within a day or two: name the thing that went wrong, say what changed, give one route to take the rest offline. Worked replies for every rating sit in our review response examples, and the hard end of the range is in how to respond to a 1-star review.

How a network trains 40 front desks not to click

One owner deciding carefully is not a defence when 40 receptionists share a generic inbox. A dental group with 40 practices can fix that with one rule and no training deck: nobody opens a review from an email link, ever. Reviews get read in one place, and that place is not your inbox.

Two things make the rule stick. Give every location one named person who can see the reviews, so a front desk that gets a scary email has somebody to forward it to instead of a decision to make. And give the team the honest reason, which is the FTC's: "Train employees not to send passwords or sensitive information by email, even if the email seems to come from a manager." A rule with a reason under it survives the week. A rule without one does not.

It is also easier to hold when there is somewhere real to look. Cloutly pulls reviews from 39 review sites into one inbox across every location, from the source rather than from a notification, so a review nobody can find there is a review that probably does not exist.

Frequently asked questions

Is the "you have a negative review" email real?

Sometimes. The way to find out is never the link. Open your profile on the platform the message names, signed in, and look at the reviews. If the review is there, the notification was real. If it is not, the message was written to make you click something.

The sender address looks right. Is that enough?

No. Yelp warns specifically about lookalike domains, and gives yeIp.com with a capital I as its example. Meta publishes the six domains its mail comes from, and Yelp and Tripadvisor publish their link rules, so an address that fails those rules is definitely fake. An address that passes them is only probably genuine.

Can anyone remove a bad review for a fee?

No. Google documents a free report, one appeal per review and a legal request, and Yelp says there has never been any amount of money that changes a review or rating. Anyone selling removal is selling you the free routes, a legal process, or nothing.

What should I do if a staff member clicked the link and signed in?

Change that password immediately, and anywhere else it was used. Turn on two-step verification. Then open the profile's list of owners and managers and remove anything you do not recognise, because taking the password is usually a step towards taking the listing.

Customer feedback analysis turns what customers wrote into a theme, a count and a decision. For a service business, the raw material may already be sitting on public review profiles, whether a customer was prompted to leave a review or wrote one on their own. The aim is a theme with a number beside it and the reviews behind that number.

Verified 6 September 2026 against Google's help page on managing customer reviews, the Google Business Profile API's review data reference, and the Maps user contributed content policy.

Some customer-feedback guides begin with a survey. If a business already has a steady run of public reviews, it can first read that material in a consistent way and see what it says by location.

What customer feedback analysis has to produce

The problem usually appears at the end of the process. Someone reads a handful of reviews, writes "customers are frustrated with our booking process" in a deck, and nobody knows whether that means nine people or ninety, which site they visited, or whether the issue is new. A useful analysis produces four things.

A theme without a count is an anecdote. A count without a comparison is hard to interpret. A score alone cannot show which issue moved or where to start.

Keep the source row available when you report the number. A manager should be able to move from "19 booking mentions" to the matching reviews without asking someone to rebuild the analysis. That makes a disputed tag easy to inspect, and it prevents a tidy chart from becoming a claim nobody can check.

The feedback you already have

Reviews and surveys answer different questions. Public reviews are continuous and visible to the next customer. Surveys can ask a narrower question of a chosen group. Both are biased samples, so each count in this method stays next to its denominator.

The longer argument is in review-led versus survey-led reputation management. For published figures on how people use reviews, see our online review statistics roundup.

How to analyse customer reviews by hand

This is a spreadsheet method for a review window you can read consistently. It starts with the reviews themselves, then makes the comparison clear enough for someone to act on it.

1. Put the reviews into one sheet

Google's help page on managing customer reviews documents reading and replying. It does not document a review download control, so copying and pasting may be the practical option for one location.

The Google Business Profile API also exposes accounts.locations.reviews.list for one location and accounts.locations.batchGetReviews across several locations. Review software may offer its own export.

Use one row per review. Include date, location, review site, star rating, review text, and a column for each theme.

2. Set the taxonomy before you start reading

A taxonomy is the closed list of themes used for tagging. Write it before the first review. If the list changes with every new comment, the results will not be comparable.

Choose a small set of themes the business can change. For Coastline Physio, a fictional three-clinic group, the list could include booking and reschedule, wait time, treatment result, practitioner, reception and admin, price and billing, parking and access, facilities, and Other. Treat that as a starting point, then revise the list between reporting periods if the Other column is carrying a meaningful share of the comments.

Write a short definition beside each label. "Booking and reschedule" might include a failed online booking, an unanswered reschedule request, or an appointment that could not be changed. "Reception and admin" might cover the front desk only. The definitions do not need to be elaborate. They need to keep two people from using the same label for different problems.

3. Tag every mention

Put a 1 in each theme column a review mentions. A single review can mention more than one theme.

Tag the mention rather than the star rating. A five-star review that says "brilliant physio, shame about the parking" still contains a parking complaint. A separate complaint-or-praise column makes that distinction visible.

Use a tagging guide and keep it with the spreadsheet. A severity score can be useful only when the people applying it share a stable rubric; otherwise it introduces another moving part.

4. Count with the denominator

Sum each theme by location and for the group. Divide each location's theme count by that location's reviews in the chosen window, rather than by total theme mentions. That denominator stays stable when an unrelated theme moves.

Check that every review profile belonging to a location is in the denominator. A duplicate profile can split the review set, which is why a duplicate profile is a different problem from two locations with the same name.

5. Compare the same view twice

Run the table for the previous window as well. You can then compare each location with the group and with its own earlier result. Use the same window length and taxonomy. A January-to-March report and an April-to-June report can sit beside each other. A two-week report beside a quarter cannot tell the same story.

When you share the result, lead with the location and the fraction: "Milton Street: 19 booking mentions in 71 reviews." Add the earlier result beside it, then link the number to the matching reviews. That small reporting pattern keeps the discussion on the evidence instead of on a chart's colour or a broad label such as "poor customer experience". It also lets the manager ask a useful follow-up: which booking step appears in those 19 reviews, and does the same wording appear in last quarter's five?

A worked example

Coastline Physio is a fictional group with three clinics. In one quarter it received 214 reviews: 96 at Harbour Road, 71 at Milton Street and 47 at Westgate. The table records complaint mentions against the taxonomy above.

Before turning a theme into work, open a handful of the reviews behind it. Counts make a good starting point, but the wording tells you whether the same label is hiding different problems. Five booking mentions might all concern the online form. Or three might be about a delayed confirmation and two about a phone queue. Keep those differences in the notes column, then decide whether they need one operational change or two smaller fixes.

That check is especially useful when a theme rises sharply. A jump may be real, but it can also reflect one busy weekend, a new staff member or several reviews describing the same incident. The count still belongs in the report. The review text simply keeps the next action specific.

The group figure says booking and reschedule accounts for 12.1% of the quarter's reviews. The location split changes the conversation: Milton Street has 19 mentions in 71 reviews, or 26.8%. Harbour Road has 4.2%; Westgate has 6.4%.

Milton Street had five booking complaints in 68 reviews in the previous quarter, or 7.4%. The clinic changed its online booking system in July. The change in the count does not prove the system caused the complaints. It gives a manager a specific place to investigate.

Harbour Road's parking issue is different. Eleven of its 96 reviews mention it, compared with one at Milton Street and none at Westgate. The clinic cannot change the street, but it can put clear parking directions in the booking confirmation.

The same example also shows why a lifetime rating can be a poor operating measure. As an illustrative weighted calculation, 552 reviews at 4.83 plus 71 new reviews at 4.52 equals about 4.7947, which rounds to 4.79. That is arithmetic for this example, not a claim about how Google calculates or displays profile ratings.

Where the manual method breaks

The limit is not a universal review count. It is whether someone can tag the chosen window using the same guide, then repeat the work when the next window closes. A three-location group with 214 reviews can use the example above as a planning exercise. A larger review flow may need a different process or software before the routine starts getting skipped.

Two checks matter as volume rises:

1. Compare a sample of tags between periods. If "waited 25 minutes past my appointment" moves from wait time to reception and admin because the tagger changed, the trend may be a tagging change.
2. Keep the reporting cadence realistic. Missing a period removes the comparison that gives the count context.

What to look for in customer feedback analytics software

Ask what every number represents. A useful screen can tell you how many reviews matched a theme and let you inspect the review set. Ask whether the result is reproducible for the same filters and whether the count is shown per location.

Look for the reviews behind the number. If a screen says 19, a manager should be able to open those 19 reviews and understand why they were included.

Ask how the tool handles one review with two issues. A review that praises a practitioner and complains about parking should be able to contribute to both themes. If the product forces every review into one bucket, the count may hide the issue that prompted the reader to open the report in the first place.

Location comparison matters too. The Coastline Physio example would have sent the wrong team looking for a fix if it had shown only a group total. The useful view puts one location beside another and beside its previous period.

Finally, check what the software turns into an action. A short list of themes, counts and underlying reviews is easier to work through than a screen that leaves the team to decide where to begin. Exporting the data can still be useful, but a manager should not need a fresh spreadsheet each month just to find the reviews behind a reported theme.

Cloutly's Ask answers a question about an account's own reviews with a computed count, shows how many reviews it searched, and links to the reviews behind the number.

Google's Maps user contributed content policy says businesses may not "selectively solicit positive reviews from customers".

Acting on what you find

The public response and the operational response are separate jobs.

Reply to the reviews behind a theme with the next reader in mind. For a parking finding, that may mean naming the nearby car park. For a booking problem, it may mean giving a direct number to call. Our review response examples cover the writing side.

Then choose one theme, name the change, record the starting share, and check the same share in the next reporting window. If Milton Street's booking share stays at 26.8% after a booking-flow change, the team has more work to do.

Reading reviews in a batch is the "Use" part of review management: the four jobs and who does them. Review monitoring covers the separate job of catching reviews as they arrive.

What to distrust

Sentiment scores. A sentiment score may be useful as one signal, but it does not replace a coded-theme count. Check whether it identifies the theme, denominator and location behind a change.

Lifetime star averages. The illustrative Milton Street calculation moves from 4.83 to 4.79 while 26.8% of its current-quarter reviews mention the same booking issue. A lifetime average may still be useful on a profile. For operations, use the chosen window and location.

Word clouds. A word cloud retains word-frequency counts, but it does not by itself tell you whether a word is praise or a complaint, or provide a coded-theme denominator. Use it as a prompt for reading, not as the report.

Frequently asked questions

What is customer feedback analysis?

Customer feedback analysis groups what customers wrote into a fixed set of themes, counts each theme against a stated denominator, and compares those counts by location and over time. The working output is a theme, a count and the reviews behind it.

How do you analyse customer reviews?

Put the reviews in one sheet, set a theme list before reading, tag every theme each review mentions, sum the columns by location, and divide by that location's review count. Run the same view for an earlier period so the result has context.

Is review data biased?

Yes. Public reviews come from customers who chose to write in public, whether prompted or spontaneous. Survey responses come from customers who chose to answer a form. Neither sample is random, so the method keeps the denominator beside the count.

What is the difference between customer feedback analysis and sentiment analysis?

Sentiment analysis classifies text by polarity. Customer feedback analysis asks what the text is about, how often it appears, and which location it concerns. Sentiment can be one field in a wider analysis.

Can you export your Google reviews?

Google's review-management help page does not document a review download control. The Google Business Profile API exposes reviews per location and in batches across locations.

You cannot remove a review from a Facebook Page yourself. A recommendation is a post the customer owns, and Meta takes one down only when it breaks the Community Standards, so reporting it is the one removal route Meta documents for a Page owner. What you get to decide is whether the review is reportable at all, whether Recommendations stay switched on for the whole Page, and what your public reply says to the next person who reads it.

Every quotation below is Meta's own wording, read off its help pages on 6 September 2026.

Can you delete a Facebook review?

No, and the reason is worth knowing before you spend an afternoon on it.

Turning Recommendations on "lets anyone logged into Facebook publish a Recommendation on your Page", in Meta's words, and nothing in that flow checks whether the person bought anything. Meta says so on the page explaining how the review count and recommendation score work: "We do not verify that users purchased the product or used the service they are reviewing or recommending on Pages on Facebook."

That sentence explains most declined reports. A review can be untrue, written by somebody who has never walked in, posted by a competitor's cousin, and none of that breaks a rule by itself. The Community Standards cover harassment and spam. They do not cover being wrong about you.

Two people can make a recommendation disappear, and you are not one of them.

The first is the customer who wrote it. A recommendation is an ordinary post, so its author can delete it like anything else they have posted, and Meta documents an Edit privacy control for changing who sees it afterwards. Only public recommendations feed your rating, so a customer switching theirs to Friends has the same effect on your score as deleting it.

The second is Meta. It removes recommendations that break the Community Standards, and separately removes reviews that break its spam policies: "when spam reviews are removed, the rating of a Page may change". Nobody tells you when that happens, which is one reason review counts move on their own.

Work out which kind of review you have first

Facebook uses the word review for four different things, and only one of them has the report path most guides describe.

The second row catches owners out, and it is on Meta's report a Recommendation page today: a bare one-star with nothing written under it has no report flow at all. What to do about one is further down. Where each of these systems shows its numbers is in the complete guide to Facebook reviews.

How to remove a review from a Facebook Page: the report path

Reporting is the only route Meta gives a Page owner to remove a Facebook recommendation. Meta's steps:

1. Click Reviews under Details below the Page cover photo.
2. Tap See all next to Recent reviews.
3. Click Options in the top right corner of the post you want to report.
4. Select Report post.
5. Follow the on-screen instructions.

What Meta says happens next is one line: "We'll review your report and may remove Recommendations that don't follow our standards." There is no case number, no published turnaround and no appeal form. You find out by looking at your Page.

The ads-linked reviews get a better tool. Report one from Ratings and reviews in Meta Business Suite and Meta says the review "will still be publicly visible" while it assesses it, with the Status column moving from Published to Pending. Page recommendations have no such column.

What makes a report worth filing

Meta judges the post against the Community Standards rather than against fairness, so the useful question is not whether the review is true but which rule it breaks. A report has a real chance when the post is abusive, hateful, obviously spam, plainly about a different business, or part of a burst from accounts with no history. It has almost none when the complaint is a bad experience described unfairly.

Build the evidence anyway. Screenshot the review with the reviewer's name and the date visible, search your booking system for that name across the dates described, and paste the review's own text into a search engine in quotation marks. The full method is in how to spot a fake review.

One rule works in your favour and almost nobody quotes it. Meta tells reviewers: "You should not leave a recommendation for a business if you help manage its Page." A competitor recommending their own Page breaks that, and so does a launch built on staff and family.

What to do about a rating with no text

This is the real gap in Meta's system. A silent one-star counts towards your score, cannot be reported, and gives you nothing to reply to.

Wait a few days before you do anything else. Meta says Page reviews that violate its spam policies "will be removed", with no report from you required, and that a Page's rating can change when they are. A coordinated run of ratings from thin accounts is the pattern that catches.

Blocking the profile stops the next one rather than fixing this one. Meta's blocking article lists what it does: the blocked profile can no longer see what you post, tag your Page, message it, or find it in search. Nothing already posted comes down. Steps are in how to ban someone from your Facebook business Page.

Then dilute it. Your rating is a share of public recommendations, so one hostile rating in thirty moves the number and the same rating in three hundred does not. Meta says a Page "may not have a rating if it hasn't received at least 5 reviews", so a young Page is fragile in a way an established one is not. Asking every customer is the only defence that works before the fact.

Hiding reviews on your Facebook Page: what it costs

Almost every page ranking for this query ends at the toggle. Meta's own description of the switch is the reason to stop there and think: "Turning Recommendations off will disable Recommendations and remove the rating and reviews from your Page."

Not the review. The rating and the reviews. All of them, including the eighty good ones you spent two years collecting. The Reviews tab goes with them, so a customer comparing you against two competitors sees two Pages with recommendations and one with none.

The toggle sits under Page and tagging, which is not where anyone expects to find reviews. Most older guides still describe the pre-redesign path, so use the current one in the Facebook reviews guide.

Meta is silent on what happens when you switch it back on. Its help page says only that the toggle removes the rating and reviews. It does note that Pages which previously had reviews had Recommendations turned on for them automatically, which suggests the history survives, but a suggestion is not a guarantee, and this is not a setting to test on a Page you care about.

The one defensible use is a Page under a coordinated attack: off for a week while Meta's spam enforcement catches up, then back on. Anything longer is not review management, it is running a business without social proof.

Reply instead, which is the option most owners skip

A reply is available now, costs nothing, and is read by everyone who arrives after it. A report may never be actioned and is read by nobody.

Reply as the Page rather than as yourself, which means checking the byline on the comment box before you type. Answer the specific complaint, keep it to four lines, and move the detail to a private channel. If you believe the review is invented, say you cannot find a record of the visit and offer a way to reach you.

Do not accuse the reviewer of lying in public, and that is a legal point rather than a manners one: the FTC's review rule bars a business from making a false accusation about a reviewer when it knows the accusation is false or is reckless about whether it is. The mechanics of replying are in the reply section of the Facebook guide; the wording to borrow is in our review response examples.

When a run of one-stars arrives with a demand for money

A burst of one-stars lands overnight from accounts with no history, and a day or two later a message arrives by email or Instagram DM offering to make them go away for a fee.

Do not pay and do not reply. Paying marks your Page as a business that pays, and nothing is removed by the transaction. Keep the message with the sender's address and the timestamps visible, report the recommendations through the flow above, and take it to your local police or consumer regulator. Google runs a dedicated extortion form for exactly this. Meta publishes no dedicated form that I could find in its help centre, so on a Facebook Page the ordinary report path is what you have.

For help separating a policy breach from an opinion you simply dislike, read how to spot a fake review. If the review is on Google instead, use the Google removal process.

When you run more than one Facebook Page

Everything above is per Page, and that is where a network gets caught out. Recommendations are a Page setting with no bulk control, so switching them off is a decision made and reversed one Page at a time. Blocking is per Page as well, and Meta says so plainly: "When you block a profile or Page, you only block it from your Page." Someone banned from your Newcastle Page can still post on the other eleven. And a duplicate Page for one of your sites collects recommendations nobody can report until somebody claims it.

The practical version is a list: every Page, its Reviews tab URL, whether Recommendations are on, and who replies. In Cloutly, reviews from Facebook and the other 38 sites it reads land in one inbox across every location, so a recommendation on the quietest Page is not something a person has to remember to check. The wider playbook is on our multi-location page.

Frequently asked questions

How do I hide reviews on my Facebook Page?

There is no per-review hide. The only control is the Allow others to view and leave reviews on your Page? toggle under Page and tagging, and Meta says turning it off removes the rating and reviews from your Page, not just the one you dislike.

Why can't I report a one-star review on Facebook?

Because it has no text. Meta's rule is explicit: "Recommendations that only include a star rating can't be reported." Its own spam enforcement is the only thing that removes those.

How long does Facebook take to remove a reported review?

Meta publishes no timeframe for Page recommendations and sends no confirmation, so check the Page rather than waiting for an email. The Business Suite tool for ads-linked reviews is the only one that shows a status, and it moves from Published to Pending while the report is assessed.

Reputation management for agencies is a productised service: you run a client's review programme for a monthly fee. The ask that goes to their customers, an inbox that catches every review, the replies, the profile data behind them, a report at the end of the month. It sells easily and loses money easily, because agencies price it per client while the cost sits in replies, and replies scale per location.

Verified 6 September 2026 against Google's help pages on local ranking, replying to reviews and profile owners and managers, the Maps content policy, and the FTC's Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule questions and answers. None of it is legal advice.

Written for the agency principal deciding whether to put this on the service list. If that is settled and the open question is whose brand the client sees, white-label review management is the piece on that.

Why clients ask agencies for reputation management

Reviews are the part of local marketing a client can see without you. They cannot read a rank tracker and they do not really believe an impressions chart, but they can read a 4.1 sitting next to a competitor's 4.7 in the map pack. So can their franchisor. So can the person on the front desk who keeps getting asked about it. That is why the request usually arrives unprompted, attached to a complaint about something else.

It is not vanity. Google names relevance, distance and prominence behind local results, says prominence is based partly on "how many reviews you have", and adds that "more reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking".

There is a reason on your side too. A reputation retainer moves a number inside the first month, in a category where most of what you sell takes a quarter to show anything, and clients rarely cancel a service whose result they can watch. The visibility runs both ways. If nothing has moved by month three, everyone can see that too.

What reputation management for agencies actually involves

The jobs are the ones any business does for itself, and the four jobs of review management covers them from the client's side. What changes for an agency is that you do them across every client at once, and your real constraint is not effort. It is approval.

Only the ask scales for free. For one client or thirty it is a template, a trigger and a decision about timing, and the trigger should come from a system that already knows the job is finished, not from a person remembering.

The inbox is where agencies underquote. Watching one profile is a notification setting. Watching four profiles across six locations for eleven clients is a list somebody opens every morning, and what you sell is that it gets opened.

Replies are the cost centre. Ten clients averaging 25 reviews a month is 250 replies, and at three minutes each that is twelve hours before one goes for approval. Approval turns twelve hours into a week of chasing. Positive review response examples has the templates worth systemising first, because praise is the volume.

How to offer reputation management as an agency: pick the delivery model first

If you intend to sell it under your own brand, read the white label buyer's checklist before you pick, because it decides what you can promise.

Set the delivery model before you quote anybody. It determines the scope and price.

Those client counts are rules of thumb, not research. The line between the first two rows is less a number than a moment: the first time you cannot answer "how many reviews did that client get last month" without opening four browser tabs.

Most of the platform shortlist looks identical in a demo, and three questions separate them. Does one login reach every client without a password swap? Does the ask fire off the client's own booking or point-of-sale system, or does somebody upload a CSV? And is each client account separate, so one client's reviews can never surface in another's dashboard?

Go white label when the client has to see your brand: when you are the agency of record and a second vendor's name on the login page invites the client to go around you. Cloutly's white-label tier points your own hostname at us with one CNAME and the certificate handled at our end, carries your name, colours, logo and links on every screen a client reaches, and puts every client account in one list you can log in to.

How to scope and price it as a retainer

Charge on locations and expected review volume, not per client, and anchor the fee against what doing the work in-house would cost the client, which is mostly reply time. A retainer quoted per client gets worse every time a good client opens a second site.

Five things the scope has to name, in writing, before the first invoice.

1. Which profiles are covered. Google, whichever second profile their customers actually use, and stop. Every extra profile is another surface you have promised to watch.
2. A review volume band. Replies are your variable cost, so state the volume the fee assumes and what happens above it. That protects you in the month a client goes viral for the wrong reason.
3. Who publishes replies. Either you draft and the client approves inside an agreed window, or you publish under a written policy with named exceptions. Pick one. Hybrids are where retainers quietly stop being profitable.
4. Whether profile data is in or out. Hours, phone, address and the monthly check on them are real work. Charge for it or say plainly it is not included.
5. The report, and its date. Same date, same numbers, every month. A report that changes shape reads as an argument.

Keep set-up out of the retainer. Access, the trigger, the reply policy and the baseline are a one-off project with a one-off fee, and folding them into month one is how the first quarter of a twelve-month retainer becomes unpaid work. Message costs work the same way: texting carries a per-message cost that varies by country, so it belongs in the contract as a named pass-through or a stated allowance.

Do not price on outcomes you do not control. Rating movement is the trap, because it lags and depends on how many reviews the client already has, so a client with 900 lifetime reviews could pay you almost nothing for excellent work. Price on the work and report on the outcome. And ask for a term: ninety days is the honest minimum, because velocity takes a month to establish and two more before a trend is a trend rather than a good fortnight.

What to report to the client each month

Four numbers, on one page, in the same order every month.

The rating row is worth the arithmetic, because it is where agencies get punished for good work. A client sitting on 400 lifetime reviews at 4.3 who collects thirty new ones at 4.9 moves their lifetime average by about four hundredths of a star. On the report that reads as nothing happened. The rolling 90-day rating moves visibly over the same period, and it is the more honest number anyway, because it describes the business as it runs now rather than as it ran in 2021.

Report AI visibility as a sample, not a rank, and say so on the page: ask an assistant the same question twice and the answer can differ. How to check whether AI recommends your business is the method, and it works better as a paid add-on than folded in for free.

Leave two things out. A sentiment score you cannot explain will cost you the whole meeting the first time a client asks how it is calculated. And never lead with a multi-location client's network average: it hides the two sites dragging the brand down, and those sites are why you were hired. The multi-location playbook covers reading a network properly.

Take the baseline before the first invite goes out. Without it, month three is your word against the client's memory.

The mistakes that end the retainer

Gating, in any form

Asking for a star rating first and showing the review links only to customers who answer four or five is review gating. Google's Maps content policy puts it in the prohibited column: merchants may not "discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews". It is self-defeating as a service, because a filtered rating describes your filter rather than the client's business. Review gating covers why vendors still sell it.

The part agencies miss is who carries the risk. The FTC's rule on consumer reviews and testimonials has been in force since 21 October 2024, and it "authorizes courts to impose civil penalties for knowing violations". Its questions and answers page asks whether advertising agencies, PR firms, review brokers or reputation management companies can be liable under it, and answers: "Yes. These entities are not immune from liability under the rule." Running the programme on a client's behalf does not move the exposure onto the client.

Incentives, and staff quotas

Google prohibits offering "payment, discounts, free goods and/or services" in exchange for a review. The same policy prohibits "merchants requesting that staff solicit a certain number of reviews" and "merchants requesting that staff solicit reviews that include specific content". That second one catches a lot of well-meaning agency work: a reviews-per-week target on a branch manager's scorecard gets written into a rollout plan without anybody checking the policy. What is allowed is soliciting content that represents a genuine experience, without incentives and without influencing the rating or the wording.

Replying without the authority to speak

Google is explicit about how a reply appears. It publishes under the customer's review, and "it will appear like your business replied, and your personal name won't be shown". The client's brand carries whatever you write, with no visible agency byline.

So the reply policy has to name the tone, the topics that always go back to the client first, and the person on the client side who answers within the day when one of those lands. Refunds, anything about a named staff member, anything clinical or legal, anything involving a minor, and anything alleging injury belong in that middle group.

Taking ownership of the client's profile

Get added to the client's Google Business Profile as a manager, not an owner. Google's own capability table gives managers the tick on "Respond to reviews" and withholds it on "Add and remove users" and "Remove Business Profiles". That is the right amount of power for a supplier to hold over an asset the client cannot rebuild. Never accept primary ownership, and never work from a login the client also uses. New owners and managers wait seven days before some profile features become available, so access is the first onboarding step, not the last.

The test is simple. If the relationship ended on Friday, would handing everything back be a five-minute administrative task?

Selling removals

You cannot delete a review the client dislikes. You can report one that breaks the platform's rules, and that test is narrower than owners expect, so selling removal as a deliverable means promising an outcome you do not control to somebody who will remember the promise word for word. How to remove negative reviews from Google has what a report can and cannot do.

An onboarding checklist for a new reputation client

Nine steps. The order matters more than the list.

1. Get access properly: manager on the Google Business Profile, an admin role on the Facebook page, named logins elsewhere. Your accounts, never the client's.
2. Audit what exists, claimed or not, including the duplicate somebody created in 2019 and the page still carrying the old address.
3. Take the baseline: reviews per location for twelve months, current rating, response rate, median reply time.
4. Find the trigger, and how a mobile number or email comes out of it. This is the step that stalls, so start it in week one.
5. Agree the reply policy: tone, approval window, escalation list, and the named person who answers.
6. Set the ask timing. A physiotherapist asking the morning after a first appointment and a builder asking after handover are different programmes.
7. Tell the frontline staff. A front desk that does not know why customers mention a text message will apologise for it.
8. Fix the wrong hours and the wrong phone number in the first fortnight, while it is still scoped as set-up.
9. Book the report date and a 30-day review, where you check whether the ask lands at the right moment.

SMS compliance for a review request comes down to four things. You need consent to text the customer, the message has to say who it is from, it has to offer a way to stop, and it must not offer anything in return for the review. The detail differs in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, and the differences matter more than the similarities.

Every SMS compliance guide ranking for the term is published by a text-message vendor and written for an American retail blast. A review request is a different message. What follows is for a business texting its own customers. It is not legal advice. Every rule below is quoted from the regulator that published it, read on 6 September 2026.

Is a review request text marketing?

Not obviously, in American law: the FCC defines an advertisement as "any material advertising the commercial availability or quality of any property, goods, or services" (47 CFR 64.1200(f)), and a review request sells the recipient nothing. It matters less than it looks, because consent is needed either way, and putting a discount code in the request ends the argument. Elsewhere it does not arise: UK rules cover "electronic mail", defined to include "messages sent using a short message service" (PECR regulation 2), and Australia's Spam Act covers email and SMS together.

What counts as consent for a review request text

United States

FCC rules "ban text messages sent to a mobile phone using an autodialer unless the phone owner previously gave consent", and "commercial texts require written consent; for informational texts, your consent may be oral" (FCC). The stricter tier, prior express written consent, is "an agreement, in writing, bearing the signature of the person called", with the number written into it. An electronic signature counts "to the extent that such form of signature is recognized as a valid signature under applicable federal law or state contract law", so whether your web form clears that bar is a question for your lawyer, not your SMS vendor. The wording is one line where you take the number: we may text you about your appointment and ask for a review, reply STOP any time.

United Kingdom

Regulation 22 of PECR bars unsolicited direct marketing by electronic mail "unless the recipient ... has previously notified the sender that he consents". The exception service businesses live under is the soft opt-in. The ICO puts it plainly: someone who "bought something from you recently, gave you their details, and did not opt out" can be marketed to about similar things, but "you must have given them a clear chance to opt out, both when you first collected their details, and in every message you send", and it "does not apply to prospective customers or new contacts".

So the opt-out has to have been offered at collection, which is a form change rather than a message change. The protection attaches to individuals, and reg 2 counts "an unincorporated body of such individuals", so a sole trader you invoiced is covered while a limited company is not.

Australia

This is where Australian review programmes are quietly non-compliant. ACMA splits consent into express, given by "filling in a form, ticking a box on a website, over the phone, face to face", and inferred, which needs "a provable, ongoing relationship with your business". Then the line that decides it: "It does not cover sending messages after someone has just bought something from your business" (ACMA, avoid sending spam).

One transaction is not consent in Australia, and you cannot fix it afterwards, because ACMA is equally direct that "you cannot send an electronic message to ask for consent, because this is a marketing message". The fix is at the counter, and the burden of proof is yours: "it's up to you to prove that you have a person's consent." Underneath the guidance sit sections 16 to 18 of the Spam Act 2003.

Who the text has to say it is from

This is the rule review requests fail most often, because the message is short and the business name gets cut for space.

Australia is the strictest. Every commercial message must "accurately identify your name or business name" and "include correct contact details", using "the correct legal name of your business, or your name and Australian Business Number (ABN)", correct "for at least 30 days after you send the message". ACMA's SMS Sender ID Register then applies from 1 July 2026: if your texts are branded with your business name rather than sent from a number, you "must contact your telco or message provider to register those sender IDs", or they "may be labelled as 'Unverified' and will be grouped together with other 'Unverified' messages, including scam messages" (ACMA). A review request in the scam pile does not get a review.

In the United Kingdom, regulation 23 of PECR bans marketing by electronic mail where the sender's identity "has been disguised or concealed", or where no valid address has been given for opt-out requests. In the United States there is no statutory sender-ID rule for texts. The carriers impose their own instead.

Wherever you are, put the business name in the first few words. On a locked phone that is all the customer sees, and an unrecognised number asking someone to tap a link reads as a scam.

Opt-out and the STOP keyword

The American rule is the strictest in the world and the most misread, and it changed recently: the FCC's revocation rules took effect on 11 April 2025 (DA 25-312).

Under 47 CFR 64.1200(a)(10) a customer may revoke consent "by using any reasonable method to clearly express a desire not to receive further calls or text messages". Replying "stop", "quit", "end", "revoke", "opt out", "cancel" or "unsubscribe" is reasonable per se. Then the part that breaks most software: a reply using any other words must be treated "as a valid revocation request if a reasonable person would understand those words to have conveyed a request to revoke consent". Somebody who replies "please stop texting me" has opted out as surely as somebody who typed the keyword. Revocations "must be honored within a reasonable time not to exceed ten business days", and senders "may not designate an exclusive means to request revocation of consent".

Australia runs a different clock. Every commercial message needs an unsubscribe option that "honours a request to unsubscribe within 5 working days", stays "functional for at least 30 days", and does not make the person "log in to, or create, an account". ACMA's own SMS examples are "Reply STOP" and "Unsub: (1800-number)", and it flags the trap: alphanumeric headers "are generally not capable of receiving return messages", so if you text from your business name, Reply STOP does not work. The United Kingdom requires a valid opt-out address in every message.

An opt-out belongs to the person, not the campaign, and in the United States that is now written down. The FCC's own summary of 64.1200(a)(10) is that it "requires a caller to treat a consumer's revocation of consent as revoking consent for all calls from the caller, irrespective of subject". That part was waived until 11 April 2026 to give senders time, and in October 2025 the Commission asked for comment on modifying it (FCC 25-76). Until it does, somebody who stopped your appointment reminders has not consented to a review request six weeks later.

Keeping that ledger across a customer file, two channels and several locations is where review programmes fall over. Cloutly's review campaigns never enrol a contact who has opted out, treat a repeat customer as one contact asked once rather than one ask per transaction, skip anyone who reviewed you in the last 90 days, stop the follow-up when the review lands, and send from a local number in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.

Quiet hours, by jurisdiction

There is less law here than the guides imply. 47 CFR 64.1200(c)(1) prohibits a telephone solicitation to a residential subscriber "before the hour of 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. (local time at the called party's location)". It is written for solicitations to residential subscribers, not for a text to a mobile, so treat it as a fence rather than a floor. Neither PECR nor the Spam Act sets hours for texts.

Set your own operating rule: 9am to 6pm in the customer's local time, mid-week rather than Saturday morning. The failure that actually happens is mechanical. The send is scheduled in head-office time and a customer three timezones west gets a 6am text asking them to rate their haircut.

10DLC registration in the United States

This is not a law and no regulator enforces it, which is why it surprises people when their messages simply stop arriving. American carriers require a business texting from a standard ten-digit local number to register the brand, meaning the legal entity, and the campaign, meaning what you send and how you collect consent. You do it through your messaging provider, approval takes days rather than minutes, and unregistered traffic gets filtered. What you send then has to match the sample message you registered, so a review campaign registered as "appointment reminders" is a problem. The substance is no stricter than the FCC's: CTIA's best practices "ask non-consumer message senders to obtain consent before texting consumers and to provide a way for consumers to opt out". It is just enforced by whoever carries your traffic.

What a review request text may never say

Consent gets you the right to send. Google's policy and the FTC's rule decide what the message may contain, and these get reviews deleted rather than fines issued.

No incentive. Google's prohibited and restricted content policy bars merchants from offering incentives "such as payment, discounts, free goods and/or services - in exchange for posting any review or revision or removal of a negative review". A prize draw counts. So does a free coffee. The FTC's Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule, in effect since 21 October 2024, bans incentives only where there is "an express or implied requirement that the reviews have to express a particular sentiment"; its worked example is "Tell us how much you loved your visit to John's Steakhouse and get a $5 coupon". The FTC forbids buying a sentiment, Google forbids buying at all, and Google is where you want the review.

No number of stars, and no scripted wording. The same Google policy says merchants should not "request that specific content be included", nor "require or pressure users to leave ratings or write reviews while on the premises".

No rating question before the review link. That is gating, and the policy bars merchants from "discourag[ing] or prohibit[ing] negative reviews, or selectively solicit[ing] positive reviews". What Google allows is the plain version: "solicit or encourage the posting of content that does represent a genuine experience, without offering incentives to do so or attempting to influence the rating or the contents of the review". More in review gating and Google's review policy explained.

Three compliant review request texts

Coastline Physio is a fictional clinic. Each message names the business early, asks once, carries one link and offers a way out. Counts assume a 24-character short link.

The first ask, the day after the appointment. 153 characters, one segment.

Hi Emma, it's Sam from Coastline Physio. If Tuesday's session helped, would you leave us a Google review? [link] Reply STOP to opt out.

The single follow-up, three to five days later. 149 characters, one segment.

Emma, Sam at Coastline Physio again. Here's that review link if you have a minute: [link] Fine to ignore. Reply STOP to stop these.

When your sender ID cannot receive replies, the Australian alphanumeric case. 136 characters, one segment.

Coastline Physio here, Emma. If your visit went well, a Google review helps others find us: [link] Unsub: 1800 000 000

All three are plain GSM-7 characters, which is what keeps them inside one 160-character segment. Paste them through a word processor and the straight apostrophe becomes a curly one, dropping the ceiling to 70 characters and turning one message into three on your bill. A longer business name tips the first two over 160, so read the segment counter before you save the template. Email versions are in the review request templates.

SMS compliance in the US, UK and Australia, side by side

Two things carry most of the risk, and neither is the wording of the message: the consent line on the form where you take the mobile number, because in Australia nothing you send afterwards can create it, and suppressing an opt-out across every channel and location, permanently. Who to ask and when is in how to get more Google reviews; the case for texting rather than emailing is in SMS vs email review requests.

For almost every service business, Google is the review site that matters. What comes second depends on your trade: Tripadvisor and Booking.com for hospitality, Houzz and Angi for trades, BBB for a US firm, your booking platform for a salon.

Search for review sites for businesses and you get the same article from four different vendors. Thirty platforms, a paragraph each, and the list is identical whether you cut hair or clear drains. None of them says the thing that decides whether a site is worth your attention: what you are allowed to do about a review once it is sitting there.

The useful answer changes by trade. Every rule below was read off the site's own help or policy pages on 6 September 2026. Where a site publishes nothing, we say so instead of guessing.

How to judge a review site

Before you add another site to your workflow, ask four questions.

Who can post?

Start with who is allowed to post. Most platform roundups skip this, even though the rules vary widely. On Google, anyone with an account can review you. Google says customers "must be signed into a Google Account to leave a review", and it does not have to be a Gmail address. That is all Google requires. Meta is blunter: turning Recommendations on "lets anyone logged into Facebook publish a Recommendation on your Page", and "we do not verify that users purchased the product or used the service".

The closed-loop sites work the other way. On Booking.com, "only guests who have booked stays through our platform ... and/or have stayed at your property can leave a review". Salon platforms like Fresha invite the client after a completed appointment and nobody else.

A 4.8 built out of verified appointments is not the same evidence as a 4.8 anyone can post to. Both look identical to your customer, which is why the closed-loop sites are the ones worth defending.

Can you reply, and can you fix the reply?

Google publishes your reply under the review and lets you edit or delete it later, though it screens replies first: "replies usually take up to 10 minutes to review, but sometimes a review can take up to 30 days". Yelp works the same way once your page is claimed, and says so plainly: "responses are public and appear below the review."

The rules diverge after that. Tripadvisor gives you one response per review and no edit button. Zomato tells restaurants that "your response can't be edited after posting, so choose your words well." Booking.com lets you edit, but only in one of its two apps. Read the detail for your site before you write anything in anger.

Facebook is the odd one out. Meta documents how a customer leaves a Recommendation, how the rating is worked out and how to switch the feature on. It publishes nothing at all on how a Page replies to one.

Are you allowed to ask?

Google encourages it, and suggests asking customers to open a review link or scan a QR code.

Yelp forbids it. The line sits inside the conflicts-of-interest bullet of its content guidelines, which is why most people have never seen it.

If you use Yelp, do not ask customers to review you there. Zomato has its own version for restaurants, "selective solicitation is a strict NO", and punishes it with a public disclaimer on your page telling diners your reviews are suspicious.

Incentives are a separate question, and the platform rules are stricter than the law. The US FTC rule on consumer reviews, in force since 21 October 2024, "does not prohibit giving incentives for reviews, as long as there isn't an express or implied requirement that the reviews have to express a particular sentiment". Google bans them outright: free or discounted goods in exchange for a review is fake and misleading content under its policy, whichever way the ask is worded.

No site on this list lets you filter who reaches the review page, though a lot of software in this category was built to do it. Google's prohibited content policy tells merchants not to "discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers", whatever the vendor calls the step. Ask everyone, in the same words, at the same point after the job.

Does it feed Google and AI answers?

If a review never appears outside its own platform, fewer people will see it. Google's own AI optimisation guide says "Google Business Profiles can help your products and services to be visible in both AI responses and other Google Search results". No other review platform has that relationship with the answer box, which is why Google comes first in every section below.

Review sites for businesses, by industry

Most service businesses need two or three sites, not thirty. Keep everything past the third column accurate, but do not treat it as another inbox to work.

Review sites for salons and beauty businesses

Google carries the whole search. Someone looking for a colourist near them is on a map, not in a directory.

Your booking platform is the second one, and salons routinely miss it because the reviews are not on the open web. Fresha is the clearest published example: a client is invited after each completed appointment, and "if an appointment is cancelled or not checked out, no invitation is sent", so the reviews are locked to people who actually sat in the chair. The client can edit theirs for 30 days. You reply under Clients, then Online reputation, then All reviews, and a team member with the right permission can answer on the services they performed. Set that up. The client is answering the stylist, not the salon.

Facebook, because a salon's audience genuinely lives there. Check one setting before anything else. Under Settings and privacy, then Settings, then Page and tagging, there is a single toggle: "Allow others to view and leave reviews on your Page?" Switching it off "will disable Recommendations and remove the rating and reviews from your Page", so it is not a display preference. Two more rules decide whether the number on your Page moves at all: Meta says "a Page may not have a rating if it hasn't received at least 5 reviews", and "only recommendations that are shared publicly are included in a Page's overall rating". A customer who posts to friends only has helped nobody.

Yelp, in US markets, with the asking rule above firmly in mind. Yelp's recommendation software also decides which reviews count, and the ones it does not recommend "don't factor into the business's overall star rating or review count". No employee at Yelp can override it. So a Yelp review can genuinely exist and change nothing, which is also why removal is harder than most guides admit: what actually works on a Yelp review covers the grounds that succeed.

The rest of the beauty directories are not worth the login. If you need the full programme rather than a list of sites, read salon reputation management.

Review sites for healthcare practices

Google first, again, and by a wider margin than in any other vertical, because a patient choosing a clinic searches a suburb and reads what comes back. Facebook second, with the same toggle to check.

After that, be sceptical of anyone who hands you a confident list. The US patient-review directories that every roundup names, Healthgrades among them, publish very little a business can actually read. Healthgrades would not open at all from Australia on 6 September 2026: every path returns "this content is not available in your current region". So this article does not tell you whether a provider can post a public response there. If your practice has a profile on one, log in and look at what your own dashboard offers rather than planning a workflow around a blog post.

For healthcare, what you write back matters more than which site you are on. Confirming that someone was a patient is itself a disclosure. What a practice can say in a public reply covers the wording, and it applies identically on Google, on Facebook and on anything you add later. Home care is a variant, because the review comes from the family: reviews for home care agencies.

Review sites for home services and trades

Google is where the job starts. Someone with a burst pipe is searching a map. The ask is in how to get reviews for home services.

Houzz is the specialist site with real weight here, and its rules are tighter than most people assume. Its review policy requires the review to come from "your first-hand experience as a client", and explicitly not from "correspondence or interactions as a potential client", so a prospect who took a quote and went elsewhere cannot review you. Employees and relatives are barred, and only one person per household may review a project. Houzz moderates before publishing, five to seven business days by its own pro help. You reply in the Review tab, where you can also feature one review, and Houzz will send review requests for you from the Get Reviews button, 50 email addresses at a time.

Angi, in the US, which is the old Angie's List. Its ratings come from homeowners who hired the pro through the platform: the category pages state the rating is "based on verified reviews from our community of homeowners who have used these pros". Angi publishes no reachable owner help on reply limits, so treat what your own dashboard offers as the answer.

BBB, also US. Most trades treat the Better Business Bureau as a badge you buy, and that is wrong twice over. BBB "publishes profiles for Accredited and non-accredited businesses alike", and "accreditation dues do not buy a rating, and they do not remove a complaint". The part worth knowing is that it runs two tracks. A complaint comes from someone who wants a resolution, stays on your profile for 36 months and can move your letter grade. A customer review is a star rating with no resolution requested, and it does not touch the grade. Both sides can comment in public, and BBB takes no anonymous reviews.

Word of Mouth, if you work in Australia. Its business FAQ is direct about both sides of the deal: on replying, "absolutely, we believe that you deserve the right of reply", and on removal, reviews "cannot be changed", with no way to pay one off or opt out. Claim the listing, because the site notes most business information was "entered by the first customer to review your business".

Lead-generation directories are a different case. Angi is one of them, and the profile is a by-product of buying leads. If you are paying for leads anyway, keep it answered. If you are not, a five-star rating behind a match-me form does nothing for the search result your next customer sees.

Review sites for hospitality

Hospitality is different. Google still leads for a cafe, a pub or a suburban restaurant, but bookings are also decided elsewhere. Running it across venues is restaurant reputation management.

Tripadvisor matters wherever a traveller is choosing between options. It checks who you are before it lets you speak: a representative claims a listing by uploading a government-issued photo ID with a face-verification photo, or by taking a phone call to the business. After that you get one response per review, up to two days of moderation, and no edit button.

Every response has to clear the management response guidelines under five headings.

Two of those bite in practice. Non-commercial rules out links unless they are relevant to the review. Relevant rules out threatening or coercing a reviewer, accusing anyone of review fraud, and arguing with Tripadvisor's policies in public. Tripadvisor also bans AI-written reviews outright, and though that rule is aimed at travellers rather than owners, the response guidelines ask for original writing anyway. The long version is in how to respond to Tripadvisor reviews, and our restaurant and hotel lists go deeper on each.

Booking.com, for accommodation, and the hardest site here to get a review onto. Only a guest who booked or stayed can review, the invitation goes out about 48 hours after check-out, the guest has three months to write it, anonymous reviews are no longer accepted, and a review stays public for 36 months. You reply from the extranet or the Pulse app, but only the extranet lets you edit or remove a reply, and moderation takes up to 72 hours. One quirk: you can only respond to a review carrying a title or a comment, so a bare score cannot be answered at all.

Zomato, in the markets where it operates. Reviews are not tied to a verified order. The rule is a stated first-hand experience, enforced after the fact, and Zomato removes content that "indicates that the author hasn't even visited or availed any services from the restaurant". Owners, staff and anyone with a business interest are barred from reviewing. The management response is permanent, and reviews describing experiences more than six months old may be deleted.

Review sites for professional services and finance

An accountant, a broker, a law firm and a mortgage adviser are in the same position: a small number of high-value clients making a long decision, and very little volume on any specialist directory.

Google carries almost the whole weight. A firm with 40 Google reviews reads as established next to one with four, and the searcher rarely goes further.

BBB, in the US, for the reason above. The complaint track is visible for three years and moves the letter grade, and a prospect deciding whether you are safe to hand money to will look at it. Answer complaints whether or not you are accredited, because accreditation is not what puts the profile there.

ProductReview.com.au, in Australia, where insurers, lenders and brokers get compared. Claiming the listing sets up a dashboard so you can reply; the free plan exists but still asks for a card. Understand the verified badge before you argue with a review. ProductReview asks for proof of purchase on submission but says it "is not mandatory outside of select categories", never shares that documentation with the business "even when asked", and will publish a review from someone who never became a customer at all.

Zillow, if you sell or finance US property, where agent and lender reviews sit beside the listing the buyer is already reading. Brokers have their own limits on repeating a review, in Google reviews for mortgage brokers.

Beyond those, most specialist directories are too quiet to justify regular work. Put that effort into a steady flow of Google reviews and answer each one, rather than spreading it over six profiles nobody visits. Prospects read the replies closely, and review response examples has the wording.

Review sites for multi-location networks

A network with 40 sites still uses the same list, but every profile and response workflow multiplies. Nothing on any of these platforms lets you answer once for the group. Each Google Business Profile has its own reply box. Each Facebook Page has the toggle set separately, and each needs five reviews of its own before it shows a rating. Each Tripadvisor property is claimed on its own, with its own identity check. Each Booking.com property has its own extranet login.

The failures show up in two places. A few locations are unclaimed, or claimed by a manager who left, so the reviews land where nobody is reading them. Elsewhere, the hours, phone number and address stop matching what you would tell a customer, and the next batch of reviews is about a locked door rather than the service. Fix both before you widen the list of sites. Listings management and the multi-location playbook both start there.

Claim your Apple Maps place card at the same time. It is a listing you claim rather than an inbox you work, and it moved this year: Apple Business Connect is now Apple Business, and most guides still send you to a URL that redirects. The current steps are in how to add your business to Apple Maps.

The review sites that no longer matter

Foursquare. Foursquare has closed its consumer city guide. Its support site records that the app ran "until December 15, 2024", the web version until "early in the 2025 New Year", and after that "City Guide in its entirety will no longer be available". Your listing survives in Swarm and goes out to Foursquare's data partners, so keep the details right, but there is nothing there to work.

Citysearch. Once the default US city guide. Today citysearch.com is a working shell around an empty product. Search plumbing contractors in Los Angeles and you get business names and street addresses, no phone numbers, no links, no ratings, no reviews, and half the results are in San Francisco, Fresno and Santa Cruz. Click a category profile and it answers "we're sorry, but the business information is not available at this time". Nothing to claim, nothing to reply to. Read on 6 September 2026.

Yellow Pages-style directories. The brand survives on both sides of the Pacific and the product underneath it has changed. An Australian Yellow Pages profile carries a phone number, a website link, directions and a gallery, and no reviews at all. In the US, yellowpages.com category pages do still show star ratings and review counts, next to a panel pushing you to claim the listing. Treat both as citations. A correct name, address and phone number helps your Google listing a little. They offer little else.

Anything you cannot name a customer who used. For the rest of the thirty, ask whether you can think of one person who found you through the site. If you cannot, the profile is a record to keep accurate, not an inbox to work.

Which of these Cloutly reads

Cloutly reads 39 review sites, Google, Facebook, Yelp, Tripadvisor, Booking.com, Zomato, Houzz, BBB, Zillow, ProductReview and Word of Mouth among them, and brings what they say into one inbox.

Healthgrades is not one of those 39, so a US practice that relies on it still has to check the site directly.

Yelp is one of the 39, but that does not change its rule against asking customers for reviews. Use the inbox to read and reply to Yelp reviews. If a vendor promises to generate them for you, it is asking you to break Yelp's policy.

Where to start

Start with Google and Facebook, then add the specialist site for your trade.

1. Your Google Business Profile. Everything else is a distant second.
2. Your Facebook Page, with the review toggle checked. It is one switch and plenty of Pages have it off.
3. The one specialist site your trade is judged on, from the table above.

Then work on volume, because the number of reviews is what a searcher compares first. How to get more Google reviews covers the ask and the timing.

To get reviews for home services, ask every customer once, on the day the job is finished and the invoice is paid, from the person who did the work, with a link that opens the review box. That is the whole method.

What makes it hard for a trade is not the wording of the ask. It is that the ask has to go out while the van is still on the street, and the office usually finds out the job is done a day later, when the paperwork lands.

Why reviews decide more for a trade than for almost any other business

Nobody can see the work. A customer can taste a meal and look at a haircut. They cannot inspect a soldered joint behind a wall or a refrigerant charge, and they know it. So they judge what they can see: whether you turned up inside the window, whether the invoice matched the quote, whether the hallway looked the same afterwards, and what other people said about all three.

That leaves you with two problems that generic review advice tends to miss.

You get one shot per customer. Most home services do not see the same customer again next month. A hot water system or a switchboard upgrade is a once-a-decade job for that household. If the ask does not go out while the work is still fresh, it probably will not go out at all.

Your reviews go stale in public. A homeowner reading five-star reviews from 2023 reads them as a business that used to be good. Seasonal trades feel this hardest. An HVAC company that collects a year of reviews in two summer weeks looks dormant every autumn.

Neither is fixed by asking harder. Both are fixed by asking on every job, in the week the job happened.

How to get reviews for home services: time the ask to the job

The moment to ask is the moment the job closes, and every trade already records it: the invoice being paid, the payment going through on the card reader in the van, the job marked complete in whatever software the office runs. That event is the trigger. A Friday list of everyone you saw this week is not, because by Friday the customer has to work out which visit you mean.

The systems already know this. Here is the event each one publishes:

If the software your jobs live in is not on that list, Zapier is the door.

The gap between the event and the ask is yours to set. Same afternoon, while the customer can still name the person who came, or the next morning if your jobs finish at eight at night. There is no right number, but there is a wrong one: "whenever someone gets around to it".

Two things to get right once. Ask once and follow up once, because a second nudge a few days later collects a good share of the people who meant to and forgot, while a third makes you the business that texts too much. And do not ask the same household twice in a year. Trades carry more repeat customers than they think, between the annual service and the landlord with six properties, and asking someone who has already written about you is the fastest way to look automated.

Cloutly is reputation management for home services. The paid invoice fires the ask, the follow-ups run on the day spacing you set, and they stop the moment the review lands. A repeat customer is one contact, asked once, and anyone who reviewed you in the last 90 days is skipped.

How to get more Google reviews has the eight ways to ask and what to send. SMS or email covers which one gets answered.

Who should ask: the tech on the job, with their own link

The customer remembers the person, not the company. They will tell a neighbour that the bloke who came out was great long before they remember what it said on the van. So the ask should come from that person, and the review should be credited to them.

The mechanism is a review link per technician, not a name in the message. Give everyone on the tools their own link and QR code, and put them where the job ends: on the invoice, on a card left on the bench, on the van door, and in the tech's phone so they can text it from the driveway. A review that arrives through Marcus's link is credited to Marcus.

Without personal links, the only way to work out who earned a review is to match a name in the review text, and plenty of reviews name nobody, name two people, or name the office. Name matching fills the gaps, and it can credit the wrong person. Give everyone their own link and the crediting runs on links alone.

Anyone adding a second van should know one thing: reviews land on the location, not on the van. Run everything from one address and every job in every van feeds one Google Business Profile, so both sides of town share a rating. Depots with their own address and phone are separate profiles with separate ratings. The multi-location review programme covers running one programme across sites rather than setting it up site by site.

What you are not allowed to ask for

You can ask for a review. You cannot ask for the contents of one. Google's user-generated content policy says merchants soliciting reviews should not "request that specific content be included", and it names the case exactly: "Merchants requesting that staff solicit reviews that include specific content, including content that identifies a staff member." So "mention Marcus in the review and we both win" is out, whatever the vendor selling you a staff leaderboard implies. The link does the crediting. The message asks for an honest review and nothing else.

The same page has three more rules that trades break by accident.

No incentives. Merchants may not "offer incentives ... in exchange for posting any review or revision or removal of a negative review", and the policy spells out what it means by incentives: payment, discounts, free goods and services. That covers the money off the next service call that half the trade forums recommend.

No filtering who gets asked. Merchants may not "discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers". Asking how it went and sending the link only to the happy ones is the practice that rule describes, whatever the software calls it. Review gating has the rule and the penalty.

No standing over them on the doorstep. Merchants "should not require or pressure users to leave ratings or write reviews while on the premises". Handing the customer your phone before you pack the van is exactly that. Send the link and leave.

Ask everyone, in the same words, at the same point after the job.

Contractor review sites: where you can ask, and where you can only reply

Google first, and it is not close. A homeowner with a burst pipe opens a map, and the map result carries your rating, your review count and your recent reviews in the same card as your phone number.

After Google, the question about any contractor review site is not how big it is. It is whether you can send your own customers there, and whether you can reply in public. Those two answers vary more than anyone expects.

Yelp is a reply site, not an ask site. Its content guidelines say, under conflicts of interest, "businesses should never ask customers to write reviews". That one sentence rules out every review-request tactic on Yelp, and almost nobody selling review software mentions it. Claim the page, answer what lands, ask nowhere near it.

Houzz says yes to both, and no to deletion. Its pro help tells you to respond promptly to a negative review, acknowledge the client and invite them to continue offline. It is equally direct about the other half: "Houzz does not remove reviews that comply with our Review Policy left by genuine past clients."

Angi, in the US, is a closed loop. Its FAQ describes the review as something Angi asks for after a hire on Angi: "When you hire a pro on Angi, we ask you to detail your experience to let your neighbors know about their work." The customer who rang you off a sticker on the van is not in that loop.

That is how lead-generation directories generally work. A review exists there only if the job came through the platform, so the rating is a by-product of buying leads rather than something you build. If you are paying for leads anyway, keep the profile answered. If you are not, stars behind a match-me form do nothing for the map result your next customer is looking at.

The site-by-site breakdown, including the specialist directories for trades and who each one lets post and reply, is in review sites for businesses, by industry. Pick two, maybe three. The rest are listings you keep accurate, not inboxes you work.

Three replies to the complaints every trade gets

Write every reply for the next reader. The person who left it has had their experience. People reading your profile next week want to know what you do when something goes wrong.

The price. Never apologise for your rate and never argue the total. Work out first whether the customer was surprised or overcharged. Here is the surprise, which is the common one in trades: the quote covered one thing and the job turned into another.

Thanks Warrick. The quote covered replacing the mixer, and the extra was the corroded stop tap behind it. We should have rung you before we touched it rather than putting it on the invoice, and that part is on us. The itemised version is in your email, and if you ring the office I will go through it line by line.

Dan, Ridgeway Plumbing

The disclosure failed, not the pricing. Say so, and name the part. "Our prices reflect our quality" reads as a business that has this argument often.

The window that came and went. The most common one-star review in home services has nothing to do with the work.

Thanks Suri. We booked you an eight to twelve window and Jed got there at ten past four. A morning spent waiting is not something an apology covers. The job before yours turned into a full rewire, and we should have rung you at nine to move you rather than letting it run into your day. If you still want us, you are first on the board Tuesday.

Mira, Oakline Electrical

Name the real failure, which is almost always the phone call nobody made rather than the delay itself. Then offer a specific slot, not "please get in touch".

The mess. Dust, boot prints, offcuts left in the garden. Small next to the work, and enormous to the person who lives there.

Thanks Denise. Cutting the ceiling for the return air makes dust, and clearing it up is our job, not something you should be finding the next morning. Rafe is coming back Thursday with the vacuum and drop sheets to do the hallway and the stairs properly, at no charge.

Bree, Wexford Air

Do not explain that some mess is unavoidable. Everyone knows. Book the return visit inside the reply, where the next reader can see it.

Thirty more replies, grouped by what the customer said rather than by star rating, are in review response examples.

"We fixed it. Can they take the review down?"

You cannot remove it, and Google will not remove it on your say-so: "Google doesn't get involved in conflict between businesses and customers. Negative reviews can highlight areas for improvement and aren't always a sign of poor service." Reporting a review works only where it breaks a content policy, evaluation "typically takes several days", and a no-violation decision can be appealed once. An accurate, unflattering review is not a policy violation.

The only person who can take it down is the customer who wrote it, from Your contributions in Google Maps. There is a detail on that help page worth knowing: when a review is edited, "the date of when the last edit was made will show up as the review's post date". An updated review does not only change the words. It resurfaces as a recent review, which is usually better for you than a deletion.

So the order is: fix it, tell them plainly what you did, then ask once.

Hi Denise, Rafe went back Thursday and the hallway and the stairs are done. I am not going to ask you to change what you wrote, because it was accurate on the day. If you think the way we sorted it is worth adding, Google lets you update your own review from Your contributions in Maps. Either way, thanks for telling us.

Bree, Wexford Air

Do not offer anything in exchange. A discount for changing a review is the incentive Google prohibits, and a customer who mentions the offer in their edit does you more damage than the original review did. Do not ask twice. And do not delete your public reply once the review is updated, because the reply is the part the next reader uses to decide.

A genuinely fake review, from someone who was never a customer, is a different process. How to remove a negative Google review covers what evidence gets a report actioned.

Frequently asked questions

How do I get more Google reviews as a plumber?

Ask every customer once, on the day the invoice is paid, from the plumber who did the job. A review link and QR code on the invoice and in the tech's phone removes the step where the customer has to find your listing among the near misses, which is where most plumber Google reviews are lost.

Can I ask a customer to mention the technician by name?

No. Google's user-generated content policy names "Merchants requesting that staff solicit reviews that include specific content, including content that identifies a staff member" as something it does not allow. Give each technician their own review link instead, and the credit follows the link.

How does an HVAC business collect reviews outside the busy season?

By asking on every maintenance visit, not only on installations. HVAC reviews cluster into two summer weeks when the ask is tied to big jobs, and a profile whose newest review is four months old reads as a business winding down.

Do electricians need to be on the trade directories?

Only where you can send your own customers, or where you are already buying leads. Ask two questions of any electrician review site: can you ask your own customers for a review there, and can you reply in public? Google says yes to both. Several directories say no to the first.

White label reputation management software is a review platform an agency resells under its own brand: your domain, your logo, your price, running on software somebody else builds and operates. It is also sold as white label review management software, and the two names cover the same thing. Choosing one is procurement, not a feature comparison. Almost every question that decides it comes down to where the line sits between what you own and what the vendor owns.

Cloutly sells a white label tier, so read this the way you would read any vendor's guide. Everything below is a question you can put to us and to everyone else on your list. We make one claim of our own, in a section marked as ours.

If you have not settled whether to resell at all, that decision comes first, and it is a different piece: white label review management covers the model, the margin and who it does not suit. This page assumes you have decided and are now choosing the platform.

What the white label reputation management software shortlists get wrong

Search the term and you get product pages and affiliate listicles. Take one of them, The CMO's "10 Best White Label Reputation Management Software in 2026", last updated 31 August 2026. It puts review platforms like GatherUp, Grade.us, Synup and Birdeye in the same ranking as Brand24 and BrandMentions, which its own one-line summaries describe as best for real-time brand monitoring and competitor mention tracking. Watching what the internet says about a brand and collecting reviews from customers are different jobs, bought by different people, for different money.

Its evaluation criteria then open on the promise the whole category runs on. It says it looks for platforms with custom domains, logos, colours and branded login screens, "so your clients never see the vendor behind the curtain." No platform here can deliver that. There is always residue somewhere, and your job as a buyer is to find out exactly where before a client does.

One more thing worth knowing before you start ringing vendors. Four of those ten publish no price at all, and the six that do use three different units between them: per location, per seat, and flat per month. So the published numbers are not comparable, and four of the ten cannot be compared at all until you have sat through four sales calls.

Fifteen questions, then, in the order they decide things.

The brand layer: whose product does it look like?

1. Whose domain, and who provisions the certificate? A subdomain of the vendor's site is not white label. Ask what the DNS record is, who issues and renews the TLS certificate, and what happens when it expires at 2am. If the answer involves you running a proxy or adding ACME records every ninety days, the platform has handed you an ops job and priced it as a feature.

2. What is configurable, field by field? Ask for the list. A real one reads like a form: name, domain, primary colour, font, website, marketing URL, privacy URL, terms URL, logo, favicon. A vague one reads like a benefit. "Full branding control" usually means a logo slot and a hex code.

3. Which surfaces carry your brand, and which do not? Walk a client's whole path and check each screen: the login page, the browser tab title and favicon, the dashboard header, the review invite their customer receives, the review widget on their website, the monthly report, the system emails. The widget footer is the one people forget, and it is the one your client's customers see.

That footer line is the surface an agency finds last and a client's customers find first. Ask to see it, ask whose name goes in it, and ask whether the client can switch it off. (Cloutly's own white label page, 6 September 2026. The agency and the practice in it are invented.)

4. Where does the vendor's name survive? Every platform in this category has a list. Ask for it in writing. That list usually includes the domain review-request emails go out from until the client verifies their own, help-centre links inside the app, any hosted page the platform generates, and the terms your client agrees to. None of that is disqualifying. Finding out about it when a client asks is.

5. Does the vendor's support chat load on your domain? This is a one-minute test and it tells you more than an hour of demo. If their widget appears in a client's dashboard, you have a second support relationship you did not agree to, running in your brand.

The account layer: can you run forty of these?

6. One account per client, with real separation. Their locations, their users, their data, their login. Ask whether you can cap a client's location count, whether a client can add a location themselves, and what happens to the account on the day they stop paying you.

7. What is the agency view, precisely? Most partner portals are a searchable client list with a way into each account, which is the genuinely useful part. A cross-client roll-up of ratings and review counts, or a report you can send straight to a client, is rarer than the category's marketing implies. Ask to see the portal on a screen share, with accounts in it, not on a slide.

8. Impersonation, and what it warns you. You will spend your working day inside client accounts. Check that logging in as a client is one click, that there is an obvious way back, and that the product says plainly that the changes you make are real. A platform that lets you drift between two clients' accounts without noticing will eventually cost you one of them.

9. What tells the software the job is done? This decides whether an account survives past month three. A client who has to upload a CSV stops uploading it. A client whose booking system, point of sale or CRM fires the ask keeps going without thinking about it. Ask which integrations exist for the industries you sell to, and treat a Zapier connection as a fallback rather than an answer.

The money layer: does the margin survive growth?

10. What is the billing unit, and when does the clock start? Per location, per client, per seat, or flat. Per location tracks your cost to the value you deliver, and punishes you the month a good client opens three sites. Flat is easy to forecast and worst at the small end. Per seat quietly taxes your team instead of your revenue. Whichever it is, ask when a newly added location starts being billed, and whether the count updates on its own or somebody has to remember.

11. Does the vendor publish what a business would pay directly? Your client can search. If the vendor sells direct as well as through partners, whatever a business pays on the public site is the number your client will eventually find, so you want to know it before they do. Where it is published you can check it in a minute. Where it is not, ask what a direct customer pays and write the answer down.

12. What is the contract, and how do you leave? Term, notice period, what happens to client accounts on the day you stop paying, and whether you can export reviews, contacts and reply history in a format you could hand to a client or load somewhere else. Ask this in the first call. The answer is short, it is never in the marketing, and it is the question most likely to be met with a pause.

The delivery layer: who does the work?

13. Who writes the replies, and who approves them before they send? AI drafting has made replies much faster, and across forty accounts that is the difference between a service that works and one that does not. What you are checking is whether a person approves each reply before it publishes. Automatic publishing under your brand, on a client's public profile, is a risk you are taking on their behalf.

14. How many review sources, and are they read or written? Reading a site means the reviews turn up in your inbox. Writing to it means the platform can publish hours, phone numbers and replies back. Vendors list both under "supported sites". Ask which is which for the four or five sites your clients care about.

15. Does it gate? A rating step placed in front of the review sites, so only some customers are sent on to Google, is still sold to agencies as a benefit. Do not resell it. Google's tips for getting more reviews say that offering incentives in exchange for posting, changing or removing reviews is "strictly prohibited". And the FTC, asked directly whether a business may ask for reviews only from the customers it thinks are happy, gives an answer no vendor will put on a slide.

The rule that answer refers to took effect on 21 October 2024, and the same guidance answers whether advertising agencies, public relations firms and reputation management companies can be liable under it: "Yes. These entities are not immune from liability under the rule." When you resell, your brand is on the invoice and the vendor's conduct runs under your name. That makes question 15 a procurement question rather than an ethics seminar. None of this is legal advice, and the rule is American, so if your clients are elsewhere your own regulator is the one to read. What gating is and why it does not work anyway has the longer version.

The one-page version

Take this into the demo.

Where we sit

Cloutly's white label tier answers that list this way: one CNAME points at us and the certificate is ours to manage, your name, colour, font, logo and icon go in under Settings, and one partner bill a month is tiered by your clients' total locations while what you charge those clients stays yours to set.

That paragraph is the only claim we make on this page. Run the same fifteen rows against us that you run against everyone else.

How to run the trial so it tells you something

The default way to evaluate this software is a demo and a feature grid, which tests the vendor's sales team rather than the product. Do this instead, over about a week.

1. Set up your own agency as the first client. Your brand, your domain, your locations. You will find the residue in an hour, and before a paying client does.
2. Onboard one real client, and time it. However long that took is your onboarding cost per account, and it decides how many clients one person can carry.
3. Send fifty real invites. Watch what lands, from which sender, on which device, and what your client's customer sees when they tap through.
4. Break something. Disconnect a profile, add a location mid-month, ask a support question through the channel your client would use. How a platform behaves when it goes wrong is the part no demo shows.
5. Ask for the exit. Request a full export of everything from step 2 and see what arrives.

Step 2 is the one that surprises people, because onboarding hours are the real cost of this service and no platform quotes them. What the agency work involves week to week prices that side of it.

Questions people ask

How much does white label reputation management software cost? Published entry prices run from tens of US dollars a month to a few hundred, but the number on the page is not comparable between vendors, because some price per location, some per seat, some per client and some flat. Normalise it yourself: take your expected client count and total location count in twelve months, and price each vendor against that. Then add the part nobody quotes, which is your onboarding and reply-writing hours.

Is there free white label reputation management software? Not in a form worth building a service line on. Free tiers in this category are single-account, vendor-branded, or both, which defeats the point. The nearest honest version is a trial, and a trial only tells you anything if you run it the way described above.

What is the difference between white label and reseller pricing? White label describes what the client sees: your brand on the software. Reseller describes who pays whom: the vendor bills you, you bill the client, and you set the number. Most partner programmes are both. A programme that is white label without being a reseller arrangement leaves the vendor billing your client directly, which is a different business entirely.

Before you shortlist

Fifteen questions is more than a first call will hold, so if you get two, make them the ones at either end. Question 1 tells you whether the product is genuinely yours to sell. Question 12 tells you what it costs to be wrong about that. Get straight answers to both and the middle is negotiable.

If you are also comparing platforms for your own business rather than for clients, choosing review management software covers the same ground without the agency layer.

White label reputation management is review management an agency sells to its clients under its own brand, using a platform somebody else built and runs. It is also sold as white label review management, which means the same thing. The agency owns the client relationship, sets the price and answers the phone. The vendor supplies the software and sending infrastructure, and stays in the background.

It is a good line for an agency. Reviews arrive every month whether anyone works on them or not. That gives you recurring revenue without another renewal conversation, and clients can see the result on their own Google profile without needing a report to explain it.

Almost every page about this is written by someone selling it. This one is too. Cloutly sells a white label tier, and it gets one paragraph and a partner quote a long way down. That is the only place we come up. The rest is what an agency principal needs to decide before signing anything.

What is white label reputation management?

White label reputation management is a review platform an agency resells under its own brand and domain. The agency owns the client contract, the price and the support. The vendor supplies the software and stays in the background.

You sign the client, invoice them and set the number. Your clients log in at your address, see your logo, and get their reviews collected, answered and displayed. The vendor bills you, not them. The confusion starts because two quite different products are sold under the same name.

Software, or a team

Do not start by asking which is cheaper. Decide whether reviews are a service you intend to deliver or a product you intend to hand over. If you are handing it over, the platform has to work for a salon manager on a Tuesday afternoon with no training. If you are delivering it, one of your people needs to move through forty accounts in a morning. Those are different products, and most vendors are good at only one of them.

How the commercial model works

Your agency deals with the client and runs the account. The vendor provides the platform underneath it.

The contract and the price are yours. The client signs with your agency, so there is no vendor agreement for them to accept and no second relationship to manage. What the vendor charges you is a cost, not a price list. Agencies routinely buy per location and sell per client, or the reverse.

You also handle support. Every question about why a review has not appeared, why a text did not send, or how to change a template comes to you first. That is the correct arrangement on a properly white-labelled platform, but it is still a real load.

Onboarding happens on your timeline, not the vendor's. That includes connecting profiles, importing customers and setting up campaigns. If a client leaves, your margin goes with them and you keep paying the platform until you remove the account.

The vendor is responsible for uptime, deliverability, review ingestion from the sites, the app itself and the roadmap. If any of it fails, it is not yours to fix, but your client will still call you. That is why you need to inspect the platform before you sell it.

What to look for in a white label platform

Before you sell a platform under your name, inspect these six parts of it. They tell you whether it is white label reputation management software you can build a service line on, or just a logo swap.

1. Your own domain, and who provisions the certificate. A subdomain of the vendor's site is not white label. Ask what the DNS change is, and who provisions and renews the TLS certificate. If the answer involves you running a proxy or adding ACME records every ninety days, you have just bought an ops job.

2. Per-client accounts with real separation. One login per client, their own locations, users and data. Ask whether you can cap a client's locations, whether adding one is self-serve for them, and what happens to the account when they stop paying you.

3. An agency-level view, and be precise about what it does. Most partner portals are a client list with a way into each account. That is genuinely useful, and it is usually where the usefulness stops. A cross-client roll-up of ratings and review counts, or a report you can send straight to a client, is rarer than the marketing implies. Ask to see the portal before you assume it is in there.

Check whether the portal gives you the number of accounts, the locations you are billed for, what changed today, and one click into any of them. Then compare that with what your monthly report needs. Anything it cannot give you is something somebody in your office types out by hand. (Cloutly's own white label page, 6 September 2026. The agency and clients in it are invented.)

4. The billing model, in the shape you sell. Per location, per client, or flat. Per location tracks your cost to the value you deliver but punishes you the month a client opens three sites. Flat is easier to forecast and worse at the small end. Whichever it is, ask when a new client's location starts being billed, and whether the count syncs on its own or someone has to remember.

5. Who talks to the end client. Check whether the vendor's support widget loads on your domain, whether their help centre is linked from anywhere inside the app, and whether their name appears in any system email. Each one is a support conversation you did not get to have.

6. What stays vendor-branded, honestly. Every platform in this category has residue: the domain review-request emails send from until the client verifies their own, help links inside the dashboard, widget footers, terms and privacy links, any hosted page the platform generates. Ask for that list in writing. A vendor who says "nothing" has not looked.

Our buyer's checklist for white label reputation management software takes those checks further, covering all fifteen and showing what a good answer and a bad answer sound like for each.

Cloutly's own white label tier answers those six this way. You point one CNAME at us and the certificate is ours to manage. Your name, colour, font, logo and icon go in under Settings. You get one partner bill a month, tiered by your clients' total locations, and what you charge those clients is yours to set.

Word of Mouth Online runs Cloutly as a partner. Its director, Anthony Barry:

"The Cloutly team has been instrumental in helping us move faster on growth goals. Their tech is robust, the rollout was seamless, and their support has been first-class."

How agencies price white label reputation management

Nobody can hand you a number. It depends on your market, your delivery cost and what else the client buys. But there are only a handful of structures, and the wrong one quietly kills the margin.

Four inputs decide the actual figure: your platform cost per client, the hours you will spend per client per month, how long you expect the account to live, and what the client's alternative is. That last one is usually nothing, which is why pricing off the vendor's rate card undersells the service.

The operational reality of forty clients

Selling forty accounts is a sales problem. Keeping them running is a different job, and it is mostly not the software.

Onboarding is the bottleneck. Every account needs a Google Business Profile connected, locations added, a customer source wired up, message templates written, and one person at the client who owns it. That is an hour on a good day and an afternoon on a bad one. Sign fifteen in a month and delivery slips on the thirty you already have.

The customer source decides whether the account lasts. A client who has to upload a CSV stops around month three, the reviews stop, and the cancellation arrives in month five. A client whose booking or point-of-sale system fires the ask keeps going without thinking about it. Get every account onto an integration during onboarding, because nobody goes back and does it in month four. The mechanics of the ask do not change because an agency is running it: when you ask still decides how many reviews you get.

Listings drift on their own. Hours change for a public holiday, someone edits an address, a duplicate profile appears. Nobody at the client will tell you. If listing accuracy is part of your offer it needs a monthly sweep, not an alert you hope arrives.

Decide who writes the replies before you sell it. AI drafts have made the first pass much faster, but a person still reads and sends. Across forty accounts, that needs a real weekly slot in someone's calendar. Our review response examples are written for that job: replies aimed at the next customer reading them rather than at the one who left the review.

With no cross-client view, someone spends the first week of every month copying numbers into slides. That is time your agency has to price, absorb or explain to the client. Ask about it before you sign, not in February.

Set the escalation rule early. A one-star review lands on a Saturday. Who sees it, how fast, and what do you promise? Put it in the proposal, because the client will assume an answer if you do not give them one.

Clients with several sites are where this model earns properly. They also expose a thin platform fastest. Our guide to running reviews across a network of locations covers who asks, who replies and who gets measured.

For the week-to-week work, including scope, pricing and the monthly report, see the agency work itself.

You are an agent, and the FTC says so

The legal position matters when you put your own name on the service.

The US Federal Trade Commission's Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials went into effect on 21 October 2024. The FTC's own staff Q&A asks whether advertising agencies, public relations firms, review brokers and reputation management companies can be liable under it. The answer runs to four sentences. The first one is a single word.

The same guidance says the rule's reference to a business's agents is "meant to apply to people like representatives of advertising agencies, public relations firms, and review management firms".

Read that as an agency principal. When you resell reputation management you are the agent, your brand is on the invoice, and the fact that a vendor performed the work is not a defence. The rule is American, so if your clients are elsewhere your own consumer regulator is the one to check. The platform policies below apply everywhere.

Rule out these three practices before you put your logo on a platform.

Incentives tied to sentiment

The rule does not ban incentives outright. It bans conditioning one on a particular sentiment, expressly or by implication, and the FTC's own example of an implied condition is a line most marketers would write without blinking: "Tell us how much you loved your visit to John's Steakhouse and get a $5 coupon."

Google is stricter than the rule. Its tips for getting more reviews call offering incentives in exchange for customers posting, changing or removing reviews "fake & misleading content", and say it is "strictly prohibited".

That is a platform policy, not a law, and the sanction is not a fine. It is your client's profile.

Review gating

A rating step in front of the review sites, where four and five stars go to Google and one and two go to a private feedback form, is the oldest feature in this category and it is still sold to agencies as a benefit. The FTC's position is that asking only the customers you believe are happy is not specifically prohibited by the rule, but the practice could violate the FTC Act.

Do not resell it. It is the feature most likely to be sitting behind your brand when somebody looks, and the rating it produces is worthless as evidence anyway. What review gating is, and what Google and the FTC say about it has the detail.

Promised removals

Nobody can delete an honest negative review. A partner can flag reviews that break a platform's content policy, which is a different and much smaller claim, and what Google will and will not take down is the honest version of that promise. Any vendor pitching removals is selling you an exposure with your name on it.

Is this you?

Reselling review management suits a specific kind of agency. The vendors selling it are not the people who will tell you whether yours is one.

Resell it if

• You already bill local service businesses every month, and reviews come up unprompted on client calls.
• You have, or will hire, one person who owns delivery. Not a shared responsibility, a person.
• You have enough clients to spread a platform fee across, and a pipeline that keeps adding them.
• Your clients have several locations, or you want the kind that do.
• You are willing to be first-line support, including on the Saturday a one-star lands.

Do not resell it if

• You have three clients and want a new revenue line. You will pay a platform fee to run three accounts. Put them on ordinary business accounts and sell them your time instead.
• You want passive income. This is a service business with a login attached.
• You cannot currently answer a client asking why their review has not shown up on Google yet.
• The pitch that sold you was the margin, and you have not worked out who does the onboarding.
• You need to promise a star rating. You cannot, and a provider who says you can is a problem you are buying.

If reviews are a service you have never delivered, do not start with a partner contract. Run it for two or three clients on ordinary accounts, learn where the hours go, and read what review management involves end to end. The partner tier will still be there in ninety days, and you will negotiate it a great deal better.

Common questions

How much does white label reputation management cost? There are two costs, and vendors quote one. The platform cost to you is flat, per client or per location, and most vendors publish an entry price you can find without a sales call. The other cost is delivery: onboarding hours, reply writing and reporting. Ask for the entry price, then ask for the exact rule that moves you off it.

Will my clients know which platform I am using? Mostly not, if the platform is properly white-labelled. A determined client can still work it out from an email header or a support link. Do not build the offer on secrecy. They are buying your judgement either way.

Can a white label partner get bad reviews removed? No. Reviews that break a platform's content policy can be flagged, and some of those come down. Honest negative reviews do not, and paying a customer to change or remove one is a practice the FTC has warned about separately from the rule.

Before you sign

Reputation management for agencies is not a product you switch on. Choose the shape honestly, service or software, because the wrong one leaves you with an unused login or a team you cannot afford. Before you sell the first account, name the person who will connect profiles, chase customer lists and answer the first support questions. Those jobs do not disappear because the platform carries your logo.

Everything else is comparable. If you are still narrowing the field, our guide to choosing review management software covers the six questions worth asking any vendor, white label or not.

Write the reply for the person reading it next, not only for the person who left the review. Use their first name, pick up the detail they mentioned, answer it, then give the next reader a reason to book. The examples below follow what the customer actually said, rather than their star rating, because that is what tells you how to reply.

Use any of them as a starting point, then change the line only your business could have written. That is the part people notice: generic or templated replies put off half of consumers (BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, published 11 February 2026, 1,002 US consumers). Every business and customer below is invented.

How to respond to a review, in four lines

Start with their first name. Put the detail they mentioned into your own words. If there is a problem, say what you have done and how they can reach you. Finish with a reason to return. Four sentences is enough.

Google posts an approved reply publicly under the review, under your business name rather than your personal one, and notifies the person who wrote it. That person can then revise their review, which is the case for taking the good ones seriously too.

What a good review response has, and what kills one

When the reviewer praises a person by name

When a customer names someone, they have told future customers who made the difference. Use that name, then say what the person did. Do not chase this kind of praise either: the policy above bans asking staff to solicit reviews that identify a staff member.

A clinician named by a patient.

Thanks Priya. Emma will be glad this made it into writing. She spends most of a first session on the questions people are too polite to ask, and it sounds like that landed. See you at the six-week check. Sam, Coastline Physio

One person, one thing only that person does. Swap the middle sentence for any trade.

Several people named at once.

Thanks Aisha. Kirsty, Leila and Ines were all on that Saturday, so I have read this out to the three of them. Come in before the wedding and we will hold the earlier chair. Bianca, Loomis and Fern

List them by first name. "The team" undoes a compliment the reviewer made specific on purpose.

Someone named who has since left.

Thanks Josh. Imogen finished with us in June and I have sent this to her, because she would want to know. Ravi has her Tuesday list now and has read your file. Claire, Harbour Lane Dental

Awkward, common, covered almost nowhere. Say it, then hand the reader to the replacement.

When the reviewer praises an outcome

Praise for an outcome gives the next reader something useful to judge. Pick up the result, and the reply shows what the business actually does.

A specific problem solved.

Thanks Lena. Two weeks of a shoulder that will not lift is miserable, and getting you back on the bike was the point. The band work matters more than the treatment from here, so keep at it. Sam, Coastline Physio

The review has a before and an after in it. Repeat the after.

One dish, one detail.

Thanks Dylan. The short rib takes six hours and the kitchen argues about it constantly, so this settles something. The autumn menu lands in April and it is staying on. Hana, The Copper Pot

One true thing about how it is made, and the reply stops sounding like marketing.

A customer who arrived nervous.

Thanks Georgia. Coming in after a bad experience somewhere else is the hard part, and you did the hard part. Ravi has noted the numbing gel on your file so nobody has to ask you again. Claire, Harbour Lane Dental

Answer the nerves with something you changed on their record, not reassurance.

Positive review response examples when there is no text at all

Five stars with no words is the review busy businesses see most. There is nothing to echo back, so add a fact of your own. If two replies sound alike, rewrite one.

Five stars, no comment, first visit.

Thanks for the five stars, Tom. If there was anything we could have done better, the office number is on the profile and I would rather hear it. Dan, Ridgeway Plumbing

Invites detail without asking anyone to rewrite anything.

Five stars, no comment, regular.

Thanks Aisha. Eleven visits and you have never once complained about the parking, which makes you rare. Bianca, Loomis and Fern

Two sentences, one of them a fact only you could know.

Four stars, no comment.

Thanks Priya. Four is a fair score and I would like the fifth. If there is one thing that would have got us there, my email is on the profile. Sam, Coastline Physio

Ask once, lightly, then leave it. Asking twice is how a four becomes a three.

When it is a repeat customer or a second review

A second review says more than a first one. It means the customer came back, and most businesses miss the chance to acknowledge that.

Second review, years apart.

Thanks Owen. You reviewed us in 2023 as well, which I only know because I went and looked. Different van, same job. Dan, Ridgeway Plumbing

Admit you checked. It reads as attention, not surveillance.

A customer who raised their rating.

Thanks Rachel. You gave us two stars in March and you were right to. The rebooking process changed in May because of what you wrote. Thanks for coming back to look. Hana, The Copper Pot

The most persuasive reply on any profile, and it only exists if you fixed the thing.

When the complaint is the wait

Waiting complaints are rarely only about the clock. The next reader wants to know whether anyone noticed, and what happens when it goes wrong.

A wait with no warning.

Thanks for telling me, Tom. Forty minutes past your appointment is too long, and the worse part is that nobody came out to say so. Reception now updates the waiting room every fifteen minutes. Your next clean is first thing and it is on us. Claire, Harbour Lane Dental

The silence was the failure. The free clean is optional. The fifteen minutes is not.

A wait with a real cause.

Thanks Priya. You waited because the appointment before yours turned into an emergency, which is honest but not much comfort at the time. The buffer between afternoon slots is fifteen minutes now instead of five. Sam, Coastline Physio

Give the cause once, then the change, with a number in it.

When the complaint is the price

Do not assume the price complaint is about the same thing every time. Work out whether the total came as a surprise or whether you overcharged them. Those need different replies.

Surprised by the total.

Thanks Josh. The call-out fee is on the website and in the booking text, and neither of those got in front of you, which is a problem with how we tell people rather than with you. The invoice breakdown is in your email if you want to walk through it. Dan, Ridgeway Plumbing

Disclosed but not noticed. Blame the disclosure.

Value, not price.

Thanks Nadia. Ninety dollars for forty minutes is real money and you are entitled to feel it bought you nothing. The exercises are the half that does the work, and mine are useless if nobody shows you why. Ring the clinic and ask for me. Sam, Coastline Physio

They think it was not worth it. Defend the value once, then offer your time. Not a discount.

A billing error.

Thanks Miles. You were charged twice for the March session. Our error, refunded this morning. The desk should have fixed it when you rang rather than asking you to email. Claire, Harbour Lane Dental

State the error, state the refund, do not explain the system behind it.

When the complaint is someone on your team

It is tempting to defend your staff member in public. Resist it. Take the complaint seriously in the reply, then deal with the staff issue in private.

Rudeness at the front desk.

Thanks for writing this, Priya. Being talked over when you are already in pain is not how anyone should be met at our door. I know who was on that morning and I have spoken to them. Ask for me next time and I will book you in myself. Sam, Coastline Physio

Confirm you know who it was without naming them. A public verdict on a staff member costs more than the review.

A complaint about someone's work.

Thanks Simone. If the cut did not match what you asked for, that is ours to redo and not yours to live with. I have kept Thursday morning open. Bring the photo you brought last time. Bianca, Loomis and Fern

Offer the fix and a time. A vague "please get in touch" reads as a brush-off.

When the complaint is the work itself

When a repair fails or treatment does not help, the reader needs to see what you will do next. An apology on its own does not answer that.

A repair that did not hold.

Thanks Tom. A tap dripping again after three weeks means the job is not finished, so it is under warranty and there is nothing to pay. Marcus can be there Thursday morning. Dan, Ridgeway Plumbing

Lead with the warranty, not the apology. The warranty is what the next customer is reading for.

A result that never came.

Thanks Fiona. Six sessions and no change in the knee means the plan was wrong, and I want to see the scans again before you spend anything else. Come in for a reassessment at no charge and we will either fix the plan or refer you on. Sam, Coastline Physio

Where the outcome is the product, offering to send them elsewhere is the strongest line in the reply.

When the customer is angry

Anger in a public review is not the same as anger across the counter. You can consider a written response before posting it, and it remains visible once it is public. Five moves:

1. Read it twice before you type. The second read is where the actual complaint is, and it is usually not the one in the first line.
2. Stay flat. Calm in writing reads as competence. Matching their temperature reads as guilt.
3. Thank them for the specific thing, not for "your feedback". Thank them for the detail you did not have.
4. Say what happens next, with a time in it. "I have spoken to the kitchen" is nothing.
5. Sign it, then move it off the profile. One name, one number, and stop replying in public. An angry person wants a human, and so does whoever reads it in six months.

Here is what that changes. The review: "Absolute joke. Waited 25 minutes for a table we booked, then got moved twice. Manager could not have cared less."

The reply most businesses send:

We are sorry to hear about your experience. We strive to provide excellent service to all our guests and we are sorry we fell short on this occasion. Please contact us so we can make it right.

The reply to send instead:

Thanks for this, Josh. You booked, you waited, and then we moved you twice, which turns a booking into a queue. The manager should have come to you before you had to come to her. My number is on the profile and I would like ten minutes. Hana, The Copper Pot

The first could sit under any business on earth. The second could only sit under this one.

Abusive language in the review.

Thanks for the feedback, Owen. I would like to sort the invoice out and I will need to do that by phone rather than here. The office number is on the profile and I am there until five. Elise, Meridian Financial

Deal with the one legitimate issue, leave the rest alone, and report it separately. Do not describe the abuse in your reply. That only repeats it for people who had not read that far.

When it is four stars with a criticism inside it

This is where review managers tend to get stuck, and few guides deal with it properly. Thank them only for the four stars and you look as though you missed the complaint. Apologise too heavily and you make a good review sound bad.

Keep the criticism to one sentence in the middle. Let the praise open and close the reply.

Great work, bad parking.

Thanks Priya. Glad the first session did what it needed to. The parking is genuinely bad, and the two spots behind the building are ours, so ask at the desk for the code. See you Thursday. Sam, Coastline Physio

A fixable practicality. One line, one solution, move on.

Great food, slow service.

Thanks Tessa. The short rib is worth the trip and I am glad it landed. Service on a full Saturday is slower than it should be, and we have added a runner from this month. Book the early sitting if you are in a hurry. Hana, The Copper Pot

Name the change, then give them a way around it meanwhile.

Good outcome, poor communication.

Thanks Fiona. The claim went through, which was the point. You should not have had to chase us twice to find out where it was, so clients now get a Friday update whether there is news or not. Elise, Meridian Financial

In professional services the complaint is nearly always silence. Answer it with a schedule.

Four stars and a competitor.

Thanks Simone. Four is fair. We are not the cheapest and we do not try to be, because the call-out includes the parts and a twelve-month warranty on the work. Happy to walk you through an invoice any time. Dan, Ridgeway Plumbing

State your position once and never name them.

When the review is wrong

Sometimes a review describes something that did not happen, or happened at another business. Still reply. Everyone else reading the profile needs the correction too.

Wrong business.

Thanks for writing, Josh. I think this may be about a different clinic. We have no appointment under your name and we do not offer the treatment you have described. If I am wrong, call the practice and ask for me and I will find it. Claire, Harbour Lane Dental

Leave room for being wrong. The last sentence is the one that saves you.

A policy stated incorrectly.

Thanks Aisha. The deposit is refundable up to 48 hours before the booking and it is in the confirmation email, so I want to find out where that went wrong for you. Nothing has been kept. Hana, The Copper Pot

Correct it in one sentence. Never repeat the wrong version, not even to deny it.

When the review is fake

Reply first, then report it. Removal can be slow and it often fails, so the public reply does most of the work.

A name you have never dealt with.

We have no booking, invoice or file under this name, and the job described is not one we do. The profile is open to anyone, so occasionally a review turns up that does not belong to a real visit. We have reported it. Our other 340 reviews are from people who booked. Dan, Ridgeway Plumbing

State the missing record as a fact, not an accusation, then point at the volume of real ones.

A review about a different branch.

Thanks for this. It reads like it happened at our Newtown site rather than here, and either way I want it looked at. Send the date and the docket number to the office email and I will follow it through with the right manager. Grant, Northbank Storage

Own it anyway, then route it internally.

Reporting needs evidence, not an opinion. What actually gets a review taken down is in how to remove negative reviews from Google; the reviews themselves are worked through in bad review examples.

Where to post the reply: Google, Facebook, Yelp and Tripadvisor

The platforms put replies in different places, give you different editing rights, and handle them differently before anyone sees them. Every row comes from the platform's own help page, read on 6 September 2026.

Three details catch people out. Meta's Ratings and reviews responder covers ratings collected after a customer interacts with your ads. It does not cover the Recommendations on your Page's Reviews tab, and Meta publishes no separate article for replying to one of those. A Recommendation is a Yes or a No plus text. Switch Recommendations off and the rating and every review disappear from the Page.

Yelp will not let you reply until the account has an approved profile photo of you or a representative, and it asks businesses not to solicit reviews at all. Be careful with Tripadvisor: you cannot edit a published Management Response, so write it elsewhere first.

The hardest single case has its own walkthrough in how to respond to a 1-star review on Google, and hospitality gets one in how to respond to a bad Tripadvisor review. Yelp has enough rules of its own to need eight Yelp reply templates. Where your trade limits what you are allowed to say back, start with the post for it: negative patient reviews, lawyer review examples or realtor review examples.

Who should reply, and how fast

Give the job to one named person, not the person being reviewed. At one site, that is usually the owner or manager. In a network, it is the person running the location, with a second pair of eyes on anything negative before it posts.

The expectation on speed is higher than most owners assume. In BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (published 11 February 2026, 1,002 US consumers), 89% said they expect owners to respond and 81% expected a response inside a week. The same survey found 80% are likely to use a business that answers all of its reviews, and 42% unlikely to use one that never replies.

It matters most where it is hardest to write. In a 2023 survey of 2,000 US adults by Material, commissioned by Yelp, 86% said they are more likely to look past a business's critical reviews if it answers them properly.

Use a simple rule: negative reviews inside 24 hours, everything else inside a week, and nothing unanswered for a month.

Replying at volume without sounding like a robot

Two hundred reviews a month across twelve locations cannot be handled with copy and paste, or by one person working through a spreadsheet. Draft quickly, then approve carefully. Start with the name, location, rating and review text, then have a person add the line only that business could write. Cloutly's inbox puts every location's reviews in one list and drafts the reply with AI for a person to edit and send, never automatically. More on the reputation management software page.

The specific detail still has to come from the business. If a reply could sit under another business's review without anyone noticing, 200 replies will still read like copy and paste.

Frequently asked questions

How do you respond to a positive review? Use their first name, name the specific thing they mentioned, and add one line only your business could write. Close with a reason to come back. Four sentences is plenty, and never the same four under two reviews in a row.

Should you respond to every review? Yes. In BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, 80% said they are likely to use a business that answers all of its reviews and 42% are unlikely to use one that never replies. Silent five-star reviews still deserve two sentences.

What do you say to a five-star review with no words? Two sentences carrying a fact of their own, since there is nothing to repeat back. Thank them, then add something specific: how long they have been coming, or the service they had.

Can you use AI to reply to reviews? Yes, as a first draft a person edits before it posts. Templated replies put off half of consumers, and an unedited AI reply is a template.

How long should a review reply be? Around 40 words. Long replies to negative reviews read as defensive and give the complaint more room than it had on its own. If you need more than four sentences, the conversation belongs on a phone call.

Closing a Yelp business account does not delete the business page or its reviews. It only gives up your access to manage that page. Yelp says plainly that it does not remove business pages.

That is frustrating if “delete my account” was meant to make the listing disappear, but it also makes the choice clearer. Decide what you actually want to happen before closing anything.

Business account or personal Yelp account?

Yelp has two different account types.

• A consumer account is the account someone uses to write reviews, save businesses and post photos.
• A Yelp for Business account lets an owner claim and manage a business page.

Closing a consumer account removes the content posted through that consumer profile, and Yelp says it cannot be restored. Closing a business account does not remove the business page. Yelp explains the difference in its account-closing help article.

This guide is about the business account.

Your four options

None of these is a shortcut for wiping the review history of an operating business.

Close the Yelp for Business account

In the Yelp for Business app, open Account Information, choose Close or delete my account, then follow the prompts. If the account has advertising attached to it, deal with the advertising agreement first. Closing the free business login does not necessarily cancel a separate paid contract.

Before closing it, download anything you need and make sure another owner does not still rely on the account. Once access is gone, you also lose the ordinary ability to update the page and answer reviews.

If all you want is to hand control to someone else, closing is too blunt. Add the new owner or relinquish the claim instead.

Unclaim the business page

Yelp calls this relinquishing ownership. It removes the page from your business account but leaves the listing public. Yelp's ownership guide says to contact support if the self-service option is not available.

Use this when you sold the business, claimed the wrong listing or no longer represent the company. Do not use it merely because the reviews are hard to read. An unclaimed page can still rank, collect reviews and show old information, only now nobody from the business is looking after it.

Mark a business permanently closed

If the business really has closed, update the page rather than deleting your account and hoping Yelp works it out.

Yelp's current route is Business Information, then Manage extended closures, where an eligible owner can mark the business permanently closed. Yelp warns that the owner will lose the ability to manage the page, respond to reviews and make further updates. Its closure instructions also confirm that the page is not removed.

Closed businesses can still appear in search or open from an old link. That is deliberate. The record helps people understand what happened to the business they remember.

If the real problem is a review

Do not close the account. Report the review if it breaks Yelp's content rules, answer it if it does not, and keep managing the page.

Our guide to removing a Yelp review explains what Yelp will consider. If the review stays up, use the Yelp response guide to write for the next customer who reads it.

Yelp is also unusual because it tells businesses not to ask customers for reviews. Do not try to repair the rating by sending a Yelp review campaign, offering an incentive or selecting only happy customers. The sensible work on Yelp is accurate information, honest responses and service worth talking about.

Before you close anything

Run this quick check:

1. Cancel or transfer any paid Yelp products separately.
2. Save invoices and account records you need.
3. Update hours, phone and website if the business is still operating.
4. Add another authorised owner if the business has changed hands.
5. Answer any review that needs a final public response.
6. Choose unclaim, permanent closure or account closure based on the outcome you want.

The account and the listing are not the same thing. Once you keep those separate, Yelp's options make more sense, even if none of them is the delete button you hoped to find.