Review Policy

1. How a review request actually goes out

ReviewBusiness offers two ways for a business to ask for a review, and both work the same way once someone taps the link:

A personal link: tied to one specific contact a business adds. It works once, after someone responds, that same link can’t be reused to submit a second review from the same contact.

A broadcast link: one reusable QR code or link, meant for a till counter or a WhatsApp Status post. Since it’s not tied to a specific person in advance, we ask whoever uses it to identify themselves (name and phone, always, on every rating, not only negative ones) before they rate, so the business still has a real, contactable person behind every response.

2. Every rating gets the exact same starting point

Whoever receives a request, personal or broadcast, sees the same star-rating screen first, before we know what they’re about to choose. Nobody is asked their sentiment before deciding whether to invite them to rate at all. Every recipient gets the same opportunity, 1 through 5 stars.

3. What happens after the rating, and why we’re flagging this directly

A rating of 4 or 5 stars is offered the chance to post to the business’s chosen public platform (Google, Facebook, Trustpilot, or others the business has set up). A rating of 1 to 3 stars is not sent to a public platform, instead, the feedback and the reviewer’s contact details go directly and privately to the business, so they can follow up and try to make it right.

We want to describe this plainly rather than dress it up: this is not review gating in the sense that’s legally prohibited in several markets, gating specifically means deciding in advance who gets invited to review based on expected sentiment, which ReviewBusiness does not do, everyone gets the same invitation. What this is, is a deliberate choice about where a rating goes once given, and regulators in some jurisdictions have scrutinized similar patterns closely. If your business operates in a market with strict review-authenticity rules, get this specific mechanism reviewed by a lawyer familiar with your local requirements before relying on it.

Nothing about this deletes, hides, or alters a rating. The number the customer chose is the number that exists in the business’s own records, permanently, whether it was ever posted publicly or not.

4. What a business can and can’t do to a review

A business cannot edit a star rating, ever, it is set entirely by the person who left it. A business can reply to feedback, mark it as followed up, and generate a shareable card from a positive review, but the underlying rating and written feedback stay exactly as submitted.

5. Anti-abuse measures already built in

• Personal links are single-use, once responded to, the same link can’t submit a second review
• Broadcast responses require a real name and phone number before a rating counts, not an anonymous submission
• No review, positive or negative, can be generated by anything other than a real person actually tapping through the flow, there is no AI-written review feature anywhere in the product

6. Regulatory context

Review authenticity is directly regulated in several markets, including the FTC’s rule on fake and manipulated reviews in the United States, the Consumer Review Fairness Act, the EU’s Omnibus Directive and Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, and the UK’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act. These rules generally prohibit fabricated reviews, undisclosed incentives, and inviting reviewers based on expected sentiment. A business using ReviewBusiness is responsible for its own compliance with the rules that apply to where its customers are located.

7. Questions or concerns

If something about a review looks wrong, or you have a question about how this works, contact us directly.