Asking for Google reviews is now regulated, and three habits that feel harmless are on the banned list

Three things happen in small firms every week, and none of them feels like breaking the law. A discount code goes out to anyone who leaves a review. A feedback form asks how the visit went, and only the happy answers are shown the Google link. Somebody asks around the staff room, because the profile looks thin and surely the team can put that right in an afternoon.

All three are now on the wrong side of consumer law, and since March the regulator has been demonstrating that it means it.

The law changed quietly, then the enforcement started

The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act put a set of review practices on a banned list in April 2025. Banned in the strong sense: automatically unfair, with no weighing of intent or effect. The list includes commissioning or writing fake reviews, publishing incentivised reviews without saying they were incentivised, and presenting reviews or star ratings in a way that hides the negative ones.

The Competition and Markets Authority published its guidance at the same time and allowed a grace period for businesses to sort themselves out. That period is long over. On 27 March this year the CMA opened its first five investigations under the new rules, and the conduct it named includes discounts offered in exchange for reviews and the way negative reviews were handled.

6 April 2025

The date the banned practices took effect under the DMCC Act

10%

Maximum fine as a share of global turnover, per the CMA's new powers

5

Investigations opened on 27 March 2026, the CMA's first under the review rules

The five businesses under investigation are household names, which is how regulators tend to start: establish the rules where the headlines are. But the law they are being tested against applies to a two-person firm in Knutsford exactly as it applies to a national platform. The exposure is different; the rules are not.

The discount code

Under the Act, an incentivised review is not automatically illegal. Concealing the incentive is. The trouble is that a Google review has nowhere to carry the disclosure: there is no field for "this reviewer received 10% off", so the reader takes the five stars at face value, and the concealment happens by default.

Google's own rules are stricter than the law. They prohibit offering money, discounts or free products in exchange for reviews at all, disclosed or not, and in either direction, so paying for the removal of a bad review is covered too. The penalty on that side is not a fine but removal of the reviews, and sometimes of the profile's ability to show any.

So the discount code fails twice. The law objects to the concealment, and Google objects to the incentive.

The filter form

The feedback-form funnel is the one that feels most like good manners. Ask every customer how it went; if they are happy, show them the Google link, and if they are not, route them to a private conversation where you can fix it.

The fixing part is fine. The routing part is the problem. Filtering who gets asked to go public is precisely the "hiding negative reviews" that the banned list describes, because the star rating that results is a picture of your happiest customers presented as a picture of all of them. Google bans the same move under its own name for it, review gating, and asks that you not selectively solicit reviews from customers you expect to be positive.

The distinction to hold on to: use the feedback to fix the job, never to decide who reaches the review page.

The staff room

A review from someone with a connection to the business, left without saying so, is a fake review in the guidance's terms. That covers staff, and it covers the family-and-mates round of five stars that pads out a thin profile.

These are also the reviews that read fake. A cluster of reviewers with no other activity, arriving in the same fortnight, saying nothing specific about the work: customers discount them on sight, and the platforms' detection systems are built to spot exactly that pattern. This habit was costing you credibility before it was costing you legal risk.

Asking is still legal, and still the whole game

None of this bans asking. Asking is fine. Asking everyone is the point, and it is the entire difference between a practice the CMA's guidance describes as banned and one it explicitly leaves alone.

1. 01Ask every customer, at the same point in the job, in the same words
2. 02Put the link where the customer already is: the invoice email or the job-done message
3. 03Reply to every review, including the bad ones, like a person rather than a press office
4. 04Never trade anything for a review, in either direction
5. 05Keep a note of how you ask, so you can show the pattern includes everyone

The expensive response to all this is fear. A firm that reads about 10% fines and quietly stops asking altogether will watch its profile go stale while a competitor who kept asking, properly, takes the map results. Reviews remain one of the strongest signals in local ranking, and their steady arrival matters as much as their average. We wrote last week about what actually decides local visibility, and reviews sat second on that list; nothing about this law moves them down it.

There is a quiet alignment here worth noticing. The compliant version of review-getting, everyone asked, nothing traded, negatives answered rather than buried, is also the version that produces a profile both customers and ranking systems trust. A 4.6 with a couple of answered grumbles reads truer than a wall of unbroken five stars, because it is.

We are not lawyers, and this is the CMA's guidance read carefully rather than legal advice; the guidance itself is on gov.uk and is more readable than most. But review handling is squarely part of the local search work we do, and the showroom client whose core term climbed 22 places in a month got there on profile and reviews as much as on anything technical. If you want your review habits looked at alongside the rest of your visibility, get in touch or read what the work involves on search and digital marketing.