It's like settling outside of court, rather than going to trial.Īgainst: Review gating artificially boosts reviews and ratings, creating a synthetic market where it's impossible to truly determine whether or not a business is trustworthy. Review gating has been a controversial concept for many years, and people tend to take one of two sides:įor: Review gating saves small businesses from unfair negative reviews, and allows businesses to make reparations with unhappy customers, before any dirty laundry is aired online. Instead of trying to navigate the hazardous waters yourself, we wrote a guide on how to get more Google reviews here. See that? Google would potentially view this as review gating, since the cleaner only asked for the review predicated on the customer's happy experience. Take this real-world interaction, for example:ĬLEANER: "Were you happy with how the carpets came up after our clean?"ĬLEANER: "Then we'd love if you could leave us a review on Google." It happens all the time in the real world particularly in service-based businesses too. It's worth noting, review gating isn't just something that happens inside review software. Review gating: when happy customers are asked for online reviews, and unhappy ones aren't As a result, only the most favourable reviews tend to appear online, while the bad ones aren't explicitly given the same opportunity. Conversely, if your customer has a negative experience and rates you 1 star, the review gate would instead not ask the customer for a review, and would instead collect feedback from them privately. For example, if your customer has a positive experience and rates you 5 stars, the review gate will prompt them to write a review for you. With a review gate in place, customers are filtered through different channels depending on the rating they've given you (or the experience they've had). Think of it like a door guard at a nightclub, only letting the attractive people come inside. Review gating refers to the process of selectively soliciting reviews from 'good' reviewers only. While review gating isn't as dubious as fake reviews, some still consider it unethical and bad practice. They say: "Either invite all of your customers to review you, or none of them". Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor and others regularly update their review content guidelines, and have in the last couple of years, enforced a stronger stance on review gating, warning businesses not to selectively gate reviews. Review gating isn't that nefarious, however it does bring about some controversy. It's an old-school black-hat tactic that was (and still is) used by businesses who wanted to get an artificial 'leg-up' on their competition. With more people than ever looking to online reviews as a source of consumer truth before making a buying decision, the integrity of those reviews is important.īuying 'fake' reviews on Google or other sites is nothing new. Review gating has been a point of contention for years amongst marketers, small businesses and review platforms like Google, Yelp and TripAdvisor.
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