September 23, 2026 · 10 min read

The FTC Endorsement Guides, and what they mean for the testimonials on your own website

The FTC's 2023 Endorsement Guides decide when a customer's review becomes your advertising. What small businesses must disclose, avoid and keep.

You have a testimonials page, or a strip of quotes on the homepage, or a row of screenshots from Google reviews in a proposal. Somebody trimmed a long review down to its best sentence. A staff member left a five-star review from their own account last spring. A customer got a free follow-up visit and then wrote something warm.

Each of those choices has a rule attached, and almost none of the advice written for small businesses names it. The rules sit in a document called the Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, codified at 16 CFR Part 255. The FTC rewrote it in 2023, and the rewrite is much more relevant to a local business than the version before it.

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

What the Guides are, and what they are not

The FTC is direct about the legal status. On its Endorsement Guides question-and-answer page, it says "The Guides themselves don't have the force of law." They are the FTC's statement of how it reads Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits deceptive practices. The Guides themselves put it the same way in § 255.0(a): practices inconsistent with them "may result in corrective action by the Commission under section 5."

That is softer than it sounds. The Guides are the yardstick the FTC would hold against your website, so ignoring them as "only guidance" is a bet on never being looked at.

The Guides were announced in a press release dated 29 June 2023 and published in the Federal Register on 26 July 2023, per the FTC's notice page. The FTC's list of changes includes "a new principle regarding procuring, suppressing, boosting, organizing, publishing, upvoting, downvoting, or editing consumer reviews", and a wider definition of what counts as an endorsement.

There is a second document that people confuse with the Guides, and the difference matters:

The Rule took effect on 21 October 2024 (89 FR 68034) and we have covered its individual sections in our posts on review gating and reporting a fake Google review. Its maximum civil penalty is $53,088 per violation, set by 90 FR 5580 effective 17 January 2025. This post is about the Guides, which cover what you do with reviews once you have them.

A customer's review becomes your endorsement when you use it

The Guides define an endorsement in § 255.0(b) as any advertising, marketing or promotional message that consumers are likely to believe reflects the opinions or experiences of someone other than the advertiser. A review sitting on Google is not that. It is a customer talking to other customers, and you did not put it there.

Example 7 in that section draws the line precisely, using a manufacturer's own website. A consumer who submits a review to the manufacturer's site is not automatically giving an endorsement. But "if the manufacturer chooses to highlight the review on the homepage of its website, then the review as featured is an endorsement even though there is no connection between the consumer and the manufacturer."

Translated to a local business: the review stays a review while it lives on Google. It becomes your advertising when you copy it to your website, put it in a sales deck, print it on a leaflet or post the screenshot on social media. From that moment the rest of the Guides apply to it.

Two duties follow from § 255.1:

• Honest opinion. An endorsement "must reflect the honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experience of the endorser." A quote you invented fails this test.
• No distortion. You do not need the exact words, but the endorsement "may not be presented out of context or reworded so as to distort in any way the endorser's opinion." If you use quotation marks, the words inside them must be the customer's exact words. Trimming "Great crew, but they were two hours late and I had to call twice" down to "Great crew" is a distortion.

"Results not typical" does not work

If customers in your trade report a number, such as savings on a bill, read this section twice.

Under § 255.2(b), an ad that features a customer's experience on a central attribute of the product "will likely be interpreted as representing that the endorser's experience is representative of what consumers will generally achieve." If you cannot substantiate that, you should clearly disclose the generally expected result, and be able to back that statement up.

The most-quoted workaround is the small-print disclaimer. The Guides address it directly in the heat pump example. Three customers say their utility bills fell by $100, $125 and $150 a month. The advertiser's data shows fewer than 20% of buyers save $100 or more. The Guides say a disclaimer such as "Results not typical" is insufficient, and explain why:

In another context, the Commission tested the communication of advertisements containing testimonials that clearly and prominently disclosed either "Results not typical" or the stronger "These testimonials are based on the experiences of a few people and you are not likely to have similar results." Neither disclosure adequately reduced the communication that the experiences depicted are generally representative.

That passage is the FTC reporting its own testing, and it is the reason the disclaimers you see on testimonial pages do not protect the pages that carry them. The fix the Guides offer is to state the typical outcome in plain terms, for example "the average homeowner saves $35 per month," and to base that figure on data you actually hold.

The practical rule for a small business: a testimonial that quotes a number should either be paired with the typical number, or lose the number. "They fixed it in one visit" is a subjective statement. "They cut my bill by half" is a claim you now have to support.

Connections the reader would not expect

Section 255.5(a) requires a clear and conspicuous disclosure when there is a connection between the endorser and the seller "that might materially affect the weight or credibility of the endorsement, and that connection is not reasonably expected by the audience." It lists what can count:

The employee case comes up in more small businesses than any other. Example 8 in § 255.5 says an employee posting about the employer's product must disclose the relationship, and that "the disclosure requirements in this example would apply equally to employees posting their own reviews of the product on retail websites or review platforms." The employer is told to train staff and, where it has directed such posts or knows of them, to monitor them.

A note on incentives, because this table could be misread. The Guides describe what disclosure the FTC requires when an incentive exists. They do not make an incentive safe. Example 6(ii) says that where the reviews "must be positive or reviewers believe they might face negative consequences from posting negative reviews, a disclosure would be insufficient," and that even a disclosed incentive can make an average star rating misleading if it "materially increases that average star rating." Separately, Google's contribution policy allows soliciting content that represents a genuine experience only "without offering incentives to do so." For a Google review, the practical answer is not to offer one.

What you do to reviews is regulated too

The 2023 revision added a sentence to § 255.2(d) that is short and broad. In procuring, suppressing, boosting, organizing, publishing, upvoting, downvoting, reporting or editing consumer reviews of their products, advertisers "should not take actions that have the effect of distorting or otherwise misrepresenting what consumers think of their products, regardless of whether the reviews are considered endorsements under the Guides."

The examples that follow it are the most useful part of the document for a business that runs its own review display or sends its own requests:

• Your own review page (Example 8). If you display star ratings and reviews, you are representing an accurate reflection of what purchasers said. Hiding everything below four stars would mislead. You may decline reviews containing profanity, harassment, another person's personal information or content unrelated to your products or services, and reviews you reasonably believe are fake, provided the criteria are "applied uniformly to all reviews submitted." Filtering on a pretext that is really about negativity is not allowed.
• Labels (Example 8(iii)). Marking a review you chose as "the most helpful" is deceptive if customers did not vote it that.
• Flagging (Example 10(ii)). Routinely reporting negative reviews as fake "without a reasonable basis for believing that they actually are fake" is an unfair or deceptive practice.
• Threats (Example 10(i)). Threatening reviewers with baseless lawsuits or with lawsuits you do not intend to file, in order to make them delete reviews, is an unfair or deceptive practice.
• Who you ask (Example 11). This is the request-design example.

Example 11 is worth reading in full. A marketer contacts recent purchasers for feedback, then "invites purchasers who give very positive feedback to post online reviews" and thanks the others. The Guides say this "may be an unfair or deceptive practice if it results in the posted reviews being substantially more positive than if the marketer had not engaged in the practice." Then the safe version: if the marketer "had simply invited all recent purchasers to provide feedback on third-party websites, the solicitation would not have been unfair or deceptive, even if it had expressed its hope for positive reviews."

Everyone in a defined group gets the same invitation. That is the design ReviewHero follows: one email, the same public review link for every recipient in the group, and no satisfaction question in front of it. The FTC's own example treats that shape as the compliant one.

One related rule sits outside the Guides. The FTC says the Consumer Review Fairness Act "protects consumers' ability to share their honest opinions about a business's products, services, or conduct in any forum." The Guides' footnote to Example 10 cites it as 15 U.S.C. 45b and describes it as making it illegal for companies to include standardized contract provisions that threaten or penalize people for posting honest reviews. If your customer contract or terms of service contains a "no negative reviews" clause, that is the provision to remove.

Enforcement is real, but rarely aimed at a plumber

The clearest recent case involves a telemedicine company. The FTC's July 2025 press release on NextMed alleges the company posted fake reviews, used testimonials and before-and-after photos from people who were not clients, and suppressed negative reviews by selectively challenging critical ones, offering gift cards to remove or change them and conditioning refunds on removal. The settlement was $150,000.

Each item maps to a section above. I have not found a published FTC action against a small business over a testimonials page alone, so the exposure looks low, and the cost of fixing the page is lower.

What to do next

1. Open your website, proposals and social profiles and list every place a customer quote appears. Each of those is an endorsement now, whatever its origin.
2. Compare each quote with the original review. Restore any words that changed the meaning, and re-quote anything inside quotation marks exactly.
3. Find every testimonial that contains a number, and either add the typical number you can back up or remove the figure. Delete any "results not typical" line that you were relying on.
4. Ask staff and family members whether they have ever posted a review of the business. Ask them to remove them or label them, and write a one-line policy for the future.
5. Check who you invite. Send the same request to everyone in a defined group, such as every job completed last week, rather than only the customers you think were pleased.
6. Read your customer contract for any clause that penalizes reviews and remove it.