The FTC rules on consumer reviews
The FTC's consumer reviews rule and its Endorsement Guides on review gating, rewards for reviews and reviews by staff, quoted from the official text.
In the United States, two texts from the Federal Trade Commission govern how a business may get and use customer reviews: the Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, and the older Guides Concerning Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising. Both are quoted below from the official text. They apply whatever any review site allows.
The consumer reviews rule (16 CFR Part 465)
The rule was published in the Federal Register in August 2024:
This rule is effective October 21, 2024.
Rewards tied to what a review says
The rule makes it a violation to reward a customer for a review that has to be positive, or negative:
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, regarding the product, service, or business that is the subject of the review.
A reward for any review, good or bad, is not what this section covers. It is still a reward the review should disclose (see the FTC's guide, below), and most review sites forbid it anyway (see What each review site allows).
Review gating
The rule's own text does not name review gating. When the FTC published it, the Commission said that does not make review gating safe:
The Commission notes that, although § 465.4 does not cover "review gating," review gating can nonetheless violate section 5 of the FTC Act.
The Endorsement Guides, below, show how the FTC reads review gating, with a worked example.
Reviews by owners, managers and staff
An owner or manager may not post a review of their own business without saying who they are:
It is an unfair or deceptive act or practice and a violation of this part for an officer or manager of a business to write or create a consumer review or consumer testimonial about the business or one of the products or services it sells that fails to have a clear and conspicuous disclosure of the officer's or manager's material relationship to the business
The same section limits asking employees or relatives for reviews without making sure they disclose the relationship, and it says plainly that a general request to your customers is not caught:
However, paragraph (c)(1) of this section does not apply to generalized solicitations to purchasers for them to post reviews about their experiences with the product, service, or business.
Threats over a review
Trying to stop a review, or to get one taken down, by threatening the customer is a violation:
For anyone to use an unfounded or groundless legal threat, a physical threat, intimidation, or a public false accusation in response to a consumer review that is made with the knowledge that the accusation was false or made with reckless disregard as to its truth or falsity, in an attempt to
The Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255)
Their rule for reviews is broad, and applies whether or not a review counts as an endorsement:
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.
They also give an example that describes review gating step by step, and the version that would have been fine:
A marketer contacts recent online, mail-order, and in-store purchasers of its products and asks them to provide feedback to the marketer. The marketer then invites purchasers who give very positive feedback to post online reviews of the products on third-party websites. Less pleased and unhappy purchasers are simply thanked for their feedback. Such a practice 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. If, in the alternative, 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.
And a reward counts as a connection that may need disclosing even when no review is required in return:
They can include monetary payment or the provision of free or discounted products (including products unrelated to the endorsed product) to an endorser, regardless of whether the advertiser requires an endorsement in return.
The FTC's guide for businesses
The FTC's plain-English guide, "Soliciting and Paying for Online Reviews", turns these into rules of thumb. Three of them:
Before you ask people for reviews, know the rules of the platforms and websites on which those reviews may appear.
Don't ask for reviews only from customers you think will leave positive ones.
If you offer an incentive for a review, don't condition it, explicitly or implicitly, on the review being positive. Even without that condition, the review should disclose the incentive, because its offer may introduce bias or change the weight and credibility that readers give the review.
Official sources
Every quote on this page links to the official page it comes from, read on October 4, 2026. Those pages are the ones that count: if anything here disagrees with them, they are right and we are wrong. The full list is under Official sources on the section's first page.
Related
What each review site allows
Each review site's own rules on asking for reviews, review gating and incentives, quoted word for word and linked to the page each rule comes from.
How GetSetReply handles the review rules
What the review funnel and review requests do, rule by rule: where they meet each review site's standard, and where they do not.