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Review gating
Review gating is the practice of filtering who is asked to leave a public review, so that satisfied customers are invited and unhappy ones are not..
Definition
Review gating is the practice of filtering who is asked to leave a public review, so that satisfied customers are invited and unhappy ones are not.
The term also gets used loosely for a different thing — suppressing reviews after they are written — and the two have very different consequences.
What it looks like in practice
Gating: a survey that asks how the experience was, then shows a Google review link only to people who answered positively. Suppression: displaying only four and five star reviews on your site while implying that is all of them.
Why it matters
The distinction is the point. Asking your happy customers to post publicly is what most businesses do by hand, and no US rule bans it outright. Suppressing or misrepresenting your review set is what regulators target. Platform policy is stricter than law on both counts: Google discourages selective soliciting, and Yelp asks businesses not to solicit at all.
Related terms
The FTC rule on fake reviews · How to ask for reviews · Collect customer reviews.
The full reviews glossary defines every term used across this site.
Questions
Related terms
Social proof
Social proof is the tendency to judge something by how other people have judged it.
User-generated content (UGC)
User-generated content is any content about a brand created by its customers rather than by the brand: reviews, photos, videos, comments, forum posts, social media mentions..
Testimonial vs review
A review is unsolicited feedback left on a platform you do not control, alongside everyone else’s including the critical ones.