September 2, 2026 · 10 min read

Review gating, the FTC rule, and what is actually illegal

The FTC's fake review rule does not ban review gating outright. Here is what it does prohibit, and why Google's rule is the one that bites first.

The practice has a tidy name and an ugly mechanism. You send a customer a message asking how things went. If they pick the smiling face, you show them the Google review link. If they pick the frowning face, you show them a private feedback form instead. Your public rating goes up, your complaint volume stays private, and the software vendor calls it "protecting your reputation."

The Federal Trade Commission calls it review gating, and defines it in its own words as occurring "when a business asks past purchasers to provide feedback on a product and then invites only those who provide positive feedback to post online reviews on one or more websites" (88 FR 49379, quoted in the final rule).

A great deal has been written since 2024 claiming the FTC's fake-review rule made gating illegal. That is not quite what happened, and the actual position is more interesting — and, for anyone running a local business, more useful to understand precisely.

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

What the rule is, exactly

The Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials was published at 89 FR 68034 on 22 August 2024 and took effect on 21 October 2024. It is codified at 16 CFR Part 465. The full rule text is on ftc.gov.

One date correction, because it circulates wrongly: the FTC's press release announcing the rule is dated 14 August 2024. That is the announcement. Publication was 22 August; the effective date is what matters.

Section 465.3 — the proposed rule on reusing and repurposing reviews — was not finalised, and is reserved. Review suppression is 465.7, not 465.6; a surprising number of published summaries have that wrong.

The part most articles get wrong

Section 465.4 is the incentives ban:

It is an unfair or deceptive act or practice and a violation of this part for a business to provide compensation or other incentives in exchange for, or conditioned expressly or by implication on, the writing or creation of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, whether positive or negative.

That is broad, and it catches the discount-for-a-review trade cleanly. It does not catch gating, and the Commission says so directly in the Statement of Basis and Purpose accompanying the rule:

The Commission notes that, although § 465.4 does not cover "review gating," review gating can nonetheless violate Section 5 of the FTC Act.

The footnote points at the Endorsement Guides, 16 CFR 255.2(d) and (e)(11).

And section 465.7, the suppression section, is not about gating either. Read in full, 465.7(a) prohibits using "an unfounded or groundless legal threat, a physical threat, intimidation, or a public false accusation" to stop a review being written or to get one removed. 465.7(b) prohibits a business misrepresenting that the reviews displayed on its own site represent most or all reviews submitted, when negative ones are being suppressed. Neither describes only emailing your happy customers. The FTC's own Questions and Answers page (November 2024) puts the question and the answer plainly:

Can my business ask for reviews only from customers whom we think are happy with our services? The rule does not contain a specific prohibition against such conduct. But this practice could violate the FTC Act.

So: not banned by the rule. Still actionable. The difference matters because it changes where the risk sits.

Where gating actually bites: the safe harbour you give up

The load-bearing passage is in § 465.2(d)(1), the exemption for generalised solicitations, and it is worth reading slowly:

By "generalized solicitations," the Commission means to exempt from § 465.2(b) and (c) solicitations sent to large groups of customers, such as those who purchased a particular item or who became customers during a given time period, where specific customers are not chosen based on the likelihood that they will express a particular sentiment. In contrast, solicitations made only to customers whom the business believes to be happy customers would not be "generalized solicitations" and would therefore be subject to § 465.2(b) and (c).

Read that as an insurance policy. If you ask everyone who bought something last month, you sit inside a defined exemption, and a bad review outcome is not your problem. The moment you select for expected sentiment, the exemption stops applying to you, and every resulting review is assessed against §465.2(b) and (c) — the provisions covering reviews the business knew or should have known were fake or that misrepresented the reviewer's experience.

Gating does not create a violation by itself. It removes your cover and leaves you arguing the merits on everything else.

The penalty number, and why the internet's version is stale

Knowing violations of an FTC trade regulation rule carry civil penalties under 15 U.S.C. 45(m)(1)(A). The maximum is inflation-adjusted, and most articles still quote the 2024 figure.

The current maximum is $53,088 per violation. It was raised from $51,744 by the FTC's Adjustments to Civil Penalty Amounts notice at 90 FR 5580, effective 17 January 2025, and the FTC confirmed it in a press release on 11 February 2025.

There is no 2026 adjustment. OMB Memorandum M-26-11 of 17 April 2026 cancelled the annual inflation adjustment government-wide, because the October 2025 lapse in appropriations prevented the Bureau of Labor Statistics from producing the CPI-U figure the calculation depends on. Agencies were told to keep using the 2025 amounts. The FTC's own December 2025 warning-letter release states the figure as $53,088 per violation.

"Per violation" is the phrase that does the work. In a review context each individual review or solicitation is a candidate violation, which is why the arithmetic gets alarming quickly.

What enforcement has actually looked like

Less than the headlines suggest, so far, and it is worth being honest about that.

On 22 December 2025 the FTC sent warning letters to ten companies about possible violations of the Consumer Review Rule, based on consumer complaints. The companies were not named. Warning letters are not enforcement actions and carry no penalty; they are the Commission telling an industry where it is looking.

The most instructive case is FTC v. Southern Health Solutions, doing business as NextMed, settled 14 July 2025 with a $150,000 monetary judgment expected to fund consumer refunds. The allegations describe a whole suppression apparatus: the company "suppressed negative reviews on Trustpilot by selectively challenging critical reviews, offering Amazon gift cards to consumers to remove or change negative reviews, and by conditioning refunds on consumers' agreement to remove negative reviews," and separately "generated fake positive reviews."

That is a case about a business paying and pressuring people to unsay things — not about a plumber who only emailed the customers who smiled. I have not read the complaint, so I cannot tell you whether it charged Part 465 as a count; the press release frames it in Section 5 terms. Anyone telling you the FTC has begun fining small businesses under the fake-review rule is ahead of the public record.

The rule that will reach you first

For a local business, all of the above is the slower risk. The faster one is Google, whose policy contains no nuance whatsoever. Under prohibited merchant conduct in the Maps user-contributed content policy, a business must not:

Discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers.

There is no safe harbour, no sentiment test and no exemption. What Google permits is the plain version — soliciting content "that does represent a genuine experience, without offering incentives to do so or attempting to influence the rating or the contents of the review."

Google's own documented consequences for fake-review activity are the ones that hurt a local business fastest: a profile blocked from receiving new reviews for a period, existing reviews unpublished for a period, or a consumer-facing warning on the profile saying fake reviews were removed. No court, no notice period, no appeal calendar you control.

So the practical hierarchy for a US small business is: Google's rule is stricter, is enforced automatically, and will find you long before the FTC does. If you are choosing which rule to comply with, comply with Google's and the FTC question mostly answers itself.

What a compliant ask looks like

Everyone in the same bucket gets the same message. The message contains a link to the public review page and nothing that pre-screens sentiment. No incentive, in cash or in kind. No script telling the customer what to mention.

Private feedback still has a place — it just cannot be the fork in the road. Put the "tell us privately if something went wrong" option alongside the public link, visible to every recipient, rather than in the branch reserved for unhappy ones. Everybody sees both. Nobody is routed.

This is the design constraint ReviewHero was built around: every recipient gets the same email with the same public Google link, and the private-feedback option sits next to it rather than in front of it. Any tool that offers to "filter" or "intercept" negative reviewers before the link is doing the exact thing both rulebooks name.

What to do next

1. Open your review tool and find out whether it asks a satisfaction question before showing the review link. If it does, that is gating, whatever the settings screen calls it.
2. Rebuild the ask so one message goes to everyone in a defined group — everyone served last week, everyone who bought a particular service. That is what puts you inside § 465.2(d)(1)'s generalised-solicitation language.
3. Remove every incentive, including informal ones. § 465.4 covers compensation conditioned "expressly or by implication."
4. Move the private-feedback option next to the public link rather than behind a sentiment fork.
5. If you have ever pressured a customer to remove a review, or offered anything to make one go away, read § 465.7(a) carefully. That is the section with real teeth, and it does not require a pattern.