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The rules changed, and they have teeth
The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 brought fake and misleading reviews into the list of banned commercial practices, with those provisions coming into force in April 2025. Two things in it matter to a trade business directly. Publishing or commissioning a review that does not come from a genuine customer is prohibited outright. And an incentivised review — one given in exchange for a discount, a prize draw entry or anything else of value — must be disclosed as such, or it is misleading.
Enforcement sits with the Competition and Markets Authority, which under the same Act can act directly rather than going to court first, with penalties that reach into a meaningful percentage of turnover. Realistically the regulator's attention goes to platforms and to large sellers rather than a four-van roofing firm, but that is a reason not to worry rather than a reason to chance it. The practical position is simple: the cheap shortcuts are now unlawful as well as risky, and none of them was ever necessary.
The one that catches decent businesses out is review gating. This is the practice of sending everybody a satisfaction question first and only inviting the happy ones to leave a public review, usually through a piece of software that presents it as a feature. It produces a rating that misrepresents your actual customer experience, which is precisely the sort of practice the Act is aimed at, and it breaches the platforms' rules regardless. If you are using a tool that does this, turn the filtering off.
What the platforms forbid separately
Platform rules are stricter than the law in places, and breaking them costs you the reviews and sometimes the listing.
- No incentives at all on Google. Not a discount, not a prize draw, not a bag of sweets. This is stricter than the disclosure requirement in law, and Google removes reviews and can penalise profiles it believes are buying them.
- No bulk collection at an event or a stand, and no kiosk where customers leave reviews on your device on your premises. Reviews from a single IP address in a single afternoon are trivially detectable.
- No writing them yourself, and no asking staff, family or your accountant. Detection is better than people assume and the consequences land on the profile, not the reviewer.
- No selective solicitation. Ask every completed customer or ask none.
- Do not offer to remove a review in exchange for anything, and do not threaten a customer with legal action over an honest one. Both tend to end up screenshotted.
The moment to ask
The timing question decides more than the wording does. Trade work has a narrow window where the customer feels the relief of a finished job, and it closes fast.
Ask in person first, at the point of handover, while you are showing them the work. Not “could you leave us a review” thrown over a shoulder, but a specific request from the person who did the job: you are about to get a text with a link, it takes a minute, it genuinely helps. Something in the region of one in three or four customers act on a text they were expecting, against a much smaller share of an unexpected one.
Then send within a couple of hours of leaving site. The next morning is already worse, and a week later the job has become a paid invoice rather than a relief. BrightLocal's 2026 survey found 74% of consumers give more weight to reviews from the last three months, which is the practical case for a steady trickle rather than an annual push: a review's usefulness decays, so the system has to keep producing.
Two exceptions worth building in. Do not ask on a job that went wrong, however well you recovered it. And on long contracts, ask at a milestone the customer can see rather than waiting for final completion months later.
A system that survives a busy month
Everything above collapses in a busy August unless it is automatic. The whole system is four steps.
- Get the short link. In the Business Profile dashboard, use the option to ask for reviews and copy the short link it generates. It opens the review box directly. Never send somebody to your homepage or tell them to search for you — every extra step loses a share of them.
- Attach the trigger to a thing that always happens. Marking a job complete, raising the final invoice, or the engineer closing the job on their phone. Do not attach it to a step that only happens when somebody remembers, because that is the step that stops happening.
- Send by text, not email. Trade customers open texts. Then a single follow-up three days later if no review has appeared, and stop there. Two messages is a request, four is harassment.
- Route the replies to a person. Some customers reply to the text instead of leaving a review, occasionally with a complaint. That reply needs to reach somebody the same day.
Most decent job-management systems will do this natively, and where they will not, a lightweight automation layer will. It is a common first build in our automation work because it is quick and the effect is visible within a fortnight.
What the message says
Short, from a named person, referencing the job. Compare these:
| Weak | Better | Why |
|---|---|---|
| “Thank you for your custom. Please leave us a review: [link]” | “Hi Sue, Dave here — thanks for having us in this week. If you have a minute, a quick review helps us a lot: [link]” | Named sender, specific job, honest ask |
| “We value your feedback. Rate your experience 1–10” | Direct link to the review box | The first is gating in disguise and adds a step |
| “Leave a 5 star review and get 10% off” | No incentive | Against platform rules and, undisclosed, unlawful here |
| “Please mention gutter cleaning Nuneaton in your review” | “If you can say what we did, that is really useful” | Scripting the wording is manipulation; prompting for detail is not |
That last row is a genuine line worth understanding. You must not tell people what to write. You can absolutely encourage detail, and detail is what makes a review useful — it gives a future customer something concrete, and it gives Google text to match against searches. “What we did and roughly where” is a fair prompt.
When a bad one lands
You will get one. A firm doing two hundred jobs a year with no negative reviews looks either tiny or filtered.
Leave it twenty-four hours before replying, because the reply you write in the first hour is not the reply you want in public for the next four years. Then answer briefly and factually: acknowledge, state your version once without arguing the details, and offer a direct route to sort it. Never disclose anything about the customer or the job beyond what they have already said publicly. The audience is not the reviewer, it is the next forty people who read it.
The same BrightLocal survey found 42% of consumers said they would be put off by a business that ignores its reviews. Whatever the precise number in a UK context, a run of unanswered complaints reads worse than the complaints themselves. Answer all of them, including the positive ones, briefly.
Request removal only where a review genuinely breaches the platform's policies — not a customer, abusive language, a competitor, or clearly about a different business. Success is inconsistent and slow. Getting three recent genuine reviews published above it is faster and more convincing than any removal request.
Which platforms deserve the effort
The instinct to be everywhere is wrong. Split effort and every platform looks thin.
| Platform | Who actually looks | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Nearly everyone, at the moment of choosing | Priority. Put the large majority of your effort here. | |
| Checkatrade, Which? Trusted Traders and similar | Homeowners already inside that platform | Worth it if you pay for membership anyway; not worth joining purely for reviews |
| Trustpilot | Rarely used for local trades; more common for national brands | Low priority for a local firm |
| Facebook recommendations | Local community groups, where word-of-mouth referrals actually happen | Useful secondary, especially alongside paid social |
| Your own website testimonials | People already on your site | Support only — unverifiable, so they persuade less than they used to |
BrightLocal's 2026 figures put the share of consumers reading reviews for local businesses at 97%, which is high enough that the question is not whether reviews matter but where yours are visible. For a UK trade firm the honest answer is Google first by a wide margin, one trade platform if you already pay for it, and nothing else until those two are healthy.
Measure the rate, not the total
Total review count is a vanity number that only ever goes up. Track three things instead, monthly.
- Review rate. Reviews received divided by jobs completed. A working system usually lands somewhere between a fifth and two fifths. Below one in ten, the ask is not happening or the link is too buried.
- Recency. The date of your newest review. If it is more than a fortnight old and you have completed work since, the automation has broken — and it does break, quietly, whenever a system updates.
- Response rate. The proportion you have replied to. Aim for all of them.
A firm with forty reviews including six from the last two months presents better than one with a hundred and twenty where the newest is from last autumn. That is why the rate is the number worth managing. Where the reviews then do their work is on the profile itself, which is covered in the Business Profile guide, and in the tier three section of the local SEO checklist. If you want the whole thing built and left running, that is a short conversation, and the sectors we have done it in are listed on the industries pages.
Rather have someone else do this?We run exactly this for trade and construction firms across the UK. Call and we will tell you what is realistic in your area, including when the answer is that it is not worth it.
Call 07443 392243WhatsAppCommon questions
Can I offer a discount for leaving a review?
No. Google prohibits incentivised reviews outright, and under UK law since April 2025 an incentivised review that is not disclosed as such is a banned practice. The safe position is to offer nothing and simply ask well, at the right moment, every time.
Is it legal to ask only my happy customers?
Filtering who you invite so that only satisfied customers reach the public review form misrepresents your rating and breaches platform rules. It also sits badly against the fake review provisions introduced by the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. Ask everyone whose job you completed.
How many reviews do I need before it makes a difference?
There is no threshold, and firms chasing a round number usually collect a burst and then stop. What a prospective customer reads is the rating, the recency and whether the text describes work like theirs. Twenty recent, specific reviews outperform a hundred generic ones from three years ago.
What if a customer leaves a review about a job we never did?
That is a platform policy breach rather than a difference of opinion, so report it and say plainly in your public reply that you have no record of the job and would like to check whether they have the right firm. Keep the tone neutral; the reply is read by everyone who visits afterwards.
Should I use review software or do it manually?
Either works, provided it fires automatically and does not filter. Manual asking fails not because owners are lazy but because the moment to ask arrives when they are already onto the next job. Whatever you use, check monthly that it is still sending.