Local businesses collect customer reviews the way they always have — a QR code at the counter, a tablet handed over at checkout, a request scribbled on a receipt. In 2026, several of the most common versions of this are now explicit violations of Google's Business Profile content policy, and enforcement has visibly tightened. This guide explains, in plain language, what's actually prohibited, why, and what a compliant alternative looks like.
What Google's policy actually says
Google's Prohibited & Restricted Content policy covers several review-collection practices that are treated as policy violations, not just bad practice:
Review gating — asking customers to rate their experience privately first, and only routing happy customers on to the public Google review page while diverting unhappy ones elsewhere. This is explicitly banned, regardless of intent.
Incentivized or coerced reviews — offering discounts, free items, or applying visible pressure (a staff member standing over a customer at checkout) in exchange for a review.
Reviews collected on-premises over shared Wi-Fi — not explicitly named in the policy text, but a well-documented enforcement pattern: many reviews originating from the same IP address in a short window get flagged by Google's spam systems as inauthentic and removed, sometimes along with genuine reviews from around the same time.
The line that matters: the difference between a compliant review request and gating isn't whether you ask for feedback — it's whether every customer reaches the same public Google review link regardless of what they say. Filtering who gets the public link based on predicted or actual sentiment is what crosses into gating.
Why shop Wi-Fi specifically is a problem
A driving school, clinic, salon, or print shop that asks customers to leave a review while still on the premises is often unintentionally clustering reviews on one IP address. Google's abuse-detection systems weren't built to distinguish "10 genuinely happy customers reviewing from the same shop Wi-Fi this week" from a coordinated fake-review campaign — the pattern looks similar from the outside, and the practical result for many businesses has been silent review removal or a formal warning on the Business Profile.
What a compliant flow looks like
Every customer who visits gets asked for a review, not just the ones staff think will say something nice.
The review request goes out after the customer has left — typically by WhatsApp or SMS — so it's answered from the customer's own home or mobile network, not the shop's Wi-Fi.
The public Google review link is the same link for every customer. Nothing about the flow decides, in advance, who gets routed to it.
A private channel for negative feedback can exist in addition to the public link — so an unhappy customer can tell the owner directly — but it doesn't replace or precede the public review link for anyone.
This is the mechanism Repzy is built around: a post-visit WhatsApp link that sends every customer to the same public Google review page, with a private follow-up offered separately when a visit's rating comes back low. See how the post-visit flow works or read the FAQ for specifics.
A quick self-check
If your business currently asks for reviews in-store, ask honestly: does every customer who's asked actually reach the public Google review page, or does a staff member (even informally) decide who gets asked based on how the visit seemed to go? If it's the latter, that's review gating under Google's current policy, even if no one intended it that way.
Source: Google's Prohibited & Restricted Content policy for Business Profiles. This guide reflects our reading of that policy as of the publish date above and is not legal advice.