Pillar
Reviews and third-party reputation
What people say about you on Google, Yelp, Reddit, Glassdoor and everywhere else. It's the only evidence about your firm that you didn't write, which is exactly why it carries weight you can't manufacture.
Google documents reviews as part of local prominence, and the FTC rule is law. How any one platform's content gets weighted inside an AI answer is published by nobody, and the pages that touch that are graded one by one.
Everything else on this site is about what you publish. This part is about what everyone else publishes about you.
That's the whole reason it matters. Your website says you're good. A hundred strangers saying it independently, in public, with dates on it, is a different kind of information — the kind that's hardest to fake and easiest to get caught faking.
Why do reviews matter for search and AI visibility?
Three separate jobs. Google documents prominence as an input to local ranking, and review signals feed it. They're what a prospect actually reads before they call you, so they drive conversion whether or not you rank. And they're public, timestamped, third-party text about your firm — the kind of corroboration that makes a machine confident enough to say your name instead of hedging.
That third job is the newest and the least measurable. No platform publishes how review content gets weighted when an AI recommends a business, so treat confident claims about it as reasoning, not fact.
Three audiences, and teams usually serve one
Review work goes wrong when somebody optimizes for one of these and forgets the others.
The ranking system counts what it can count — how recent, how many, which profile they're attached to. Documented only loosely, through Google's framing of relevance, distance and prominence.
The prospect reads the recent ones, the bad ones, and your replies. A flawless score with no detail persuades less than a strong average with a couple of real complaints handled well. People know what a scrubbed profile looks like.
The language model reads whatever it retrieved, which increasingly means forum threads and review text rather than your marketing copy. Nobody can optimize for this one with confidence, because no engine publishes how it weighs them.
What's in this section
Two halves.
First, Google, in depth, because for most local businesses it's simply the biggest single asset: how getting reviews actually works, what to do about pace, how to reply, what can and can't be removed, and how to run it across multiple offices without the wheels coming off.
Then everywhere else — Yelp and the directories, Reddit and the community sites that now turn up constantly in AI answers, and Glassdoor, where the recruiting case is strong and the search-visibility case is much weaker than people claim.
The one rule behind all of it
Ask everyone, on the same schedule, the same way, with no step that filters people by how happy you think they are. Never write, buy, or suppress a review, and never pay more for a good one.
That isn't etiquette. The FTC's rule on consumer reviews and testimonials has been in force since October 2024, and it reaches several things still openly sold as services. If a vendor offers to "manage" your reviews by catching unhappy customers before they post, that's the practice the rule was written for.
Google reviews
For most local businesses this is the biggest reputation asset there is, and most run it as an occasional push rather than a process. What the signals are, what a working system looks like, and which widely sold tactics are illegal.
Responding to reviews
Your reply to a bad review is read by every prospect who scrolls that far, and it's often more persuasive than the praise above it. For a law firm it's also where a confidentiality breach is most likely to happen.
Fake reviews & removal
What to do about a review that's fraudulent, from a competitor, or just untrue — and the far more common situation where your real reviews are being filtered out and nobody told you.
Reddit & communities
Forum threads turn up constantly in search results and AI answers, which makes them a reputation surface whether you show up or not. They're also where faking it fails most publicly.
Glassdoor & employer reputation
Employer-review sites matter for hiring. The widely repeated claim that they're becoming a search ranking factor has nothing behind it. Both halves of that are worth saying out loud.
Yelp & directories
The platforms beyond Google each serve a different audience. Between them, they're where your old address, your old phone number and your old firm name are still being published to anyone who looks.
Review schema
Marking up reviews you collected about yourself, on your own site, is specifically not eligible for rich results. That single rule explains most of the review markup in the wild, and why it does nothing.
Multi-location reviews
What works for one office falls apart at twelve. The hard parts are knowing which office a review belongs to, giving each one an owner, and stopping head office writing all the replies.