Spoke
Reputation and reviews, compliantly
Reviews are among the strongest trust signals there are and among the easiest to acquire illegally. The FTC rule is in force, and several ordinary marketing practices fall inside it.
The rule, its citation and its effective date come from the FTC's own Federal Register publication, linked below and recorded in our ledger.
Reviews do two jobs at once. They feed local ranking directly, and they're the clearest evidence available of the T in E-E-A-T — what happened to people who actually dealt with you.
They're also where ordinary marketing most often crosses into conduct a federal rule now prohibits.
The FTC's Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, 16 CFR Part 465, took effect on October 21, 2024. It was published in the Federal Register on August 22, 2024 at 89 FR 68034.
The rule reaches buying positive or negative reviews, insider reviews without disclosure of the relationship, company-controlled review sites, certain review suppression, and fake indicators of social media influence. The FTC can seek civil penalties. Some summaries date it August 14, 2024, which is the announcement, not the publication.
Is it legal to ask only satisfied customers for reviews?
Asking only the customers you expect to be pleased is review gating, and it's the kind of practice the FTC's rule addresses. The safe alternative is simple: ask everyone, on the same schedule, the same way, with no screening step routing unhappy people away from the public review.
Asking everyone is better commercially too. A profile with no critical reviews reads as curated, and people discount it accordingly.
What the rule reaches
The FTC's rule on consumer reviews and testimonials covers, among other things:
- Selling or buying fake reviews or testimonials.
- Buying positive reviews — or negative ones about competitors.
- Insiders writing reviews without clearly disclosing the relationship.
- Company-controlled review sites presented as independent.
- Certain practices that suppress negative reviews.
- Fake indicators of social media influence.
The FTC can seek civil penalties. The practical point: several of those describe things vendors still actively sell, and the liability lands on your business rather than on the vendor you hired.
The parts that catch ordinary firms
Incentives. Offering something for a review isn't automatically prohibited. Conditioning it on the review being positive is the problem. "Leave us a review and get a discount" is a different sentence from "leave us a five-star review and get a discount," and only one of them is defensible.
Employee reviews. A well-meaning staff member leaving a glowing review of their own employer, without saying they work there, sits squarely inside the insider-review provision. Nobody involved thinks of it as fraud.
Gating software. Some review tools are built around asking people how satisfied they are and routing only the happy ones to a public platform. That's the gating pattern, shipped as a product feature.
Suppression. Aggressively chasing removal of truthful negative reviews, or using contract terms to discourage them, is treated as suppression.
Responding to bad reviews
Respond, and respond carefully. A measured reply gets read by every future prospect and is frequently more persuasive than the praise around it.
In professional services there's a constraint that doesn't apply elsewhere: you may not be able to confirm the person was a client at all, let alone discuss what happened.
What works is responding without confirming the relationship, stating your general standard, and moving the conversation somewhere private.
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