Review gating is the "how was your experience?" funnel that routes 5-star answers to Google and quietly swallows the rest into a private feedback form. It feels clever, and plenty of reputation tools still sell it, but Google’s review policies ban it outright: you must not "discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews."
The risk is real: gated review flows can get reviews removed in bulk, and a profile that loses thirty reviews overnight loses ranking with them. The pattern is also visible, a wall of five stars with none of the texture of real feedback reads as suspicious to customers and to the systems scoring you.
The compliant version is simple: ask every customer, make leaving a review effortless, and respond to the bad ones professionally. A 4.7 with a few honest gripes and owner replies outperforms a suspicious 5.0, in trust and increasingly in ranking.
A survey that says "Rate us! 5 stars? Click here to post on Google. Less? Tell us privately" is review gating. Asking every customer the same way, regardless of how the job went, is the legal version.
Go deeper: Why Your Milwaukee Business Isn’t Showing Up in Google Maps.
This is part of our Google Business Profile work.