October 2, 2026 · 9 min read

Can you ask a customer to remove a review?

Can you ask a customer to remove a review? Only sometimes — three separate federal rules cover it, and most businesses only know one.

Can you ask a customer to remove a review you think is unfair? A customer leaves one star, you're sure it's unfair, and the instinct is to make it go away — email them and ask nicely, offer a refund if they'll take it down, or point at the "no negative reviews" line you vaguely remember putting in your intake contract. Each of those moves sits under a different piece of federal law, with a different history and a different penalty, and which one applies depends entirely on how you go about it.

This is general information, not legal advice. Rules vary and change; talk to a lawyer about your own situation.

Can you ask a customer to remove a review?

Sometimes, yes. Privately asking someone to reconsider, once their actual problem is resolved, is not illegal. Threatening them over it, writing a no-negative-reviews clause into a contract before any review exists, or paying them to make one disappear are each illegal — under three different federal rules, enforced by three different parts of the FTC.

Three different ways to get in trouble

There is no single "review removal law." There are three, they were written in different decades, and a business usually trips one without knowing the other two exist.

Threatening or intimidating the reviewer

The newest of the three is the one most people have heard of. The Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials was published at 89 FR 68034 and took effect on October 21, 2024. Section 465.7(a), the suppression provision, makes it illegal to use "an unfounded or groundless legal threat, a physical threat, intimidation, or a public false accusation that is substantially false" to stop someone writing a review, or to get one removed after the fact. An "unfounded or groundless legal threat" is defined in the rule itself as one based on a legal claim unwarranted by existing law, or on factual contentions with no evidentiary support — in plain terms, a cease-and-desist letter you don't actually have grounds to send.

That is a narrow, specific target: a demand aimed at one reviewer, backed by a threat they wouldn't otherwise face. It does not touch the ordinary customer-service response. The FTC's own Questions and Answers guidance addresses the obvious next question directly:

Does the rule prohibit my company from contacting customers who post negative reviews to resolve the reported issues? No.

The same page confirms that simply asking satisfied customers to update or refresh an old review is also outside the rule. So the line sits exactly where you'd expect: reaching out to make things right is fine; threatening, frightening, or falsely accusing the person on the other end of the review is not.

The older trap: non-disparagement clauses

Long before the 2024 rule, Congress closed a different door. The Consumer Review Fairness Act became law on December 14, 2016 and is codified at 15 U.S.C. § 45b. It voids, and bans the use of, standard-form contract terms that bar a customer from posting a review, penalize them for doing so, or force them to sign over the rights to what they wrote. The FTC's own summary is blunt: the law "prohibits businesses from using form contract provisions that bar consumers from writing or posting negative reviews online, or threatening them with legal action if they do" (FTC guidance).

This is a different mechanism from §465.7(a) above — it isn't about pressuring a specific person after a bad review lands, it's about a clause baked into every customer's paperwork in advance. A real example: in 2019 the FTC acted against Shore to Please Vacations, a vacation-rental company whose rental agreement defined anything under five stars as a breach of contract carrying a five-figure sum in liquidated damages (the exact figure is in the FTC's own case file, linked above). The consent order barred the clause, required the company to tell every past signer it was unenforceable, and ended a related lawsuit the company had filed against a reviewer.

The CRFA applies only to form contracts and terms of service, not to a one-off private request. Asking a single customer to reconsider is not a CRFA issue, however it fares under the other two rules.

Paying or gaming your way to a removal

The third route needs no threat and no contract clause at all — just money or selective effort, applied consistently to the reviews you don't like. The clearest recent example is the FTC's 2025 case against telehealth provider NextMed (formally Southern Health Solutions, Inc.), settled with a six-figure monetary judgment earmarked for consumer refunds, with a final order approved in December 2025. The complaint describes the company offering gift cards to customers who would remove or change a negative review, conditioning refunds on a customer taking a review down, and selectively disputing negative Trustpilot reviews while leaving positive ones alone — on top of generating outright fake positive reviews.

This case was brought under the FTC Act's general unfairness authority, not the 2024 rule's §465.7(a). That distinction matters if you're trying to map which provision applies: a specific threat against one reviewer is a §465.7(a) problem; a pattern of paying for, or systematically disputing your way to, removals is a Section 5 problem even without a single threat ever being made. The final order simply bans the conduct going forward and requires clearer disclosure and refund practices — it is worth reading as a list of what not to do, not as a one-off scandal.

Why the penalty number isn't the same across all three

The figure that circulates most is the FTC's current inflation-adjusted civil penalty cap, set by a January 2025 Federal Register notice at 90 FR 5580 — a five-figure maximum per violation. It's worth knowing which of the three mechanisms above it actually attaches to.

A knowing violation of §465.7(a) is a violation of a Trade Regulation Rule, which carries that per-violation cap directly. A CRFA violation reaches the same cap by a different route: the statute at 15 U.S.C. § 45b(c) treats it as a rule violation under FTC Act §18(a)(1)(B), which routes back to the same §5(m)(1)(A) penalty authority. Either way, "per violation" means per review or per customer affected, not per company — which is how a handful of pressured reviewers can add up to a serious exposure fast.

NextMed's settlement is a different kind of figure. It wasn't a per-violation penalty calculation; it was a negotiated monetary judgment earmarked for consumer redress, reached under the FTC's general Section 5 settlement authority rather than a Part 465 rule violation. A future case brought squarely under the rule, against a business with a documented pattern, is where the per-violation arithmetic would actually get used.

What actually stays legal

Reading the three cases together, the safe zone is narrower than "say nothing" but wider than most owners assume:

• Privately contacting a customer who left a negative review to try to resolve the underlying problem. The FTC says this plainly is not prohibited.
• Asking a satisfied customer to update or refresh an old review.
• Reporting a review to the platform for a real policy reason — it's fake, it's about the wrong business, it violates the platform's own content rules — rather than because it's negative. A platform's own removal tools exist for exactly this and using them correctly isn't suppression.
• Replying publicly to correct a factual error, without asking for or conditioning anything on a takedown.

What a tool can help with is keeping the private channel open without it ever becoming a fork that routes unhappy customers away from the public review page — that second move is a different FTC problem covered elsewhere on this site. ReviewHero's own request flow puts a "tell us privately" option next to the public link for every recipient, not instead of it, which is the version of "resolve it privately" that stays inside the lines above.

FAQ

Can you ask a customer to remove a review? Privately, once their issue is actually resolved, yes. Threatening them, offering them anything in exchange, or relying on a contract clause they signed in advance are each illegal under a different federal rule.

Is it illegal to ask a happy customer to leave a review? No. Asking any customer — happy or not — for a genuine review, or asking a past reviewer to update an old one, is explicitly outside the FTC's review-suppression rule.

Can a business put a "no negative reviews" clause in a contract? No. The Consumer Review Fairness Act voided those clauses nationwide in 2016, and using one is itself the violation, not just having it on file.

Does offering a refund to get a bad review removed break the law? It can. The FTC's 2025 case against NextMed treated conditioning a refund on removing a review as part of an illegal review-suppression scheme.

What to do next

1. If you're tempted to contact a reviewer, keep the message to resolving their problem — never mention the review itself as something you want changed.
2. Check any customer-facing contract, waiver, or intake form for a non-disparagement or "no negative review" clause. If one exists, it has been unenforceable since 2016 and using it is the exposure, not just having it.
3. Never offer a refund, discount, gift card, or anything else contingent on a review coming down. Resolve the complaint on its own merits first.
4. Only dispute a review through a platform's flagging tool when it's genuinely fake, off-topic, or against that platform's content policy — never simply because it's negative.
5. If a customer's review contains something false and damaging, talk to a lawyer about your actual options before sending anything that could read as a legal threat. An "unfounded" threat is the one that costs you.