Review gating: asking only your happy customers
Screening customers before deciding who gets asked for a review is common, quietly built into a lot of software, and increasingly a legal problem rather than a grey area.
Review gating is asking customers how they feel before deciding whether to invite them to write a public review. Happy ones get the link. Unhappy ones get a private feedback form.
It is common, it is quietly built into a lot of review software, and it is the practice regulators have moved against most directly.
This post describes the general direction of UK consumer protection law and is not legal advice. The specifics change; check current CMA guidance, or ask a solicitor, before making decisions about how you collect reviews.
Why it is a problem
A gated rating does not measure your service. It measures your ability to identify satisfied customers.
That distinction sounds academic until you are the reader. Someone choosing between two firms sees 4.9 and 4.3 and picks the first. If the 4.9 was collected by asking only people who had already said they were pleased, and the 4.3 by asking everyone, the reader has been steered toward the worse business by the better marketer.
That is the consumer harm, and it is why this sits in law rather than etiquette.
Where UK law has gone
The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 brought consumer-protection provisions that the Competition and Markets Authority enforces directly, without needing to go to court first.
Two things matter for reviews. Submitting or commissioning fake reviews is a banned practice. And publishing consumer reviews without taking reasonable and proportionate steps to check they are genuine is also caught.
Where gating sits depends on the detail of what you do. Presenting a filtered set of reviews as though it represents your customers generally is the risk — the misleading impression is the problem, not the act of collecting feedback privately.
The safe position is straightforward: ask everyone, publish what comes back.
What is still fine
Gating is not the same as caring what customers think.
A private feedback channel is fine — as long as it is offered to everyone rather than used to divert the unhappy.
Asking a selected group is fine if the selection is unrelated to sentiment. Every customer of one product line, everyone served in a given month, a random sample. What matters is that the criterion is not "seems pleased".
Fixing a problem before asking is fine. If someone complains, resolving it and then inviting them is legitimate — you asked, and they can still say whatever they like.
Not asking at all is fine. There is no obligation to solicit reviews.
How to tell if your software is doing it for you
This catches people out, because the gating is often a default rather than a decision. Check whether your review tool:
- Sends a satisfaction question first and branches on the answer
- Has a setting like "only invite customers who rate 4+"
- Routes low scores to a support ticket instead of a review form
- Lets you approve reviews before they publish
The last one is worth dwelling on. If you can see a review and decide whether it appears, you are not collecting reviews. You are collecting testimonials, and they should be labelled as such.
What we do about it
We do not offer gating and could not add it without dismantling the product.
Invitations go to whoever the business uploads, but the business never sees a review before it publishes, cannot approve or decline one, and cannot request removal on grounds of being unfair. There is no setting for any of it.
We also publish invitations sent alongside reviews received on every profile. A business inviting two thousand customers and showing eleven reviews is visible as exactly that.
None of this makes us noble; it makes the number mean something. A rating a business can shape is not a measurement, and a platform selling that shaping is selling the thing that makes its own product worthless.