Should I Offer a Discount for a Review? No

No. And the reason is sharper than "it is against the rules."

Three separate rulebooks answer this question, and they disagree in ways that matter. Google bans the incentive itself, whatever rating you ask for. The FTC bans incentives tied to sentiment, and started mailing letters about exactly this practice in December 2025. And the tactic solves a problem you probably do not have: 83% of consumers who were asked for a review last year went on to leave one, with nothing offered in return.

You are risking the whole profile to lift a number that responds to asking.

The short version, by rulebook

Most articles on this question flatten three different regimes into one scary sentence. The distinctions are where the actual risk lives.

Read the middle row again. The FTC rule is narrower than people think: a genuinely unconditional incentive is not automatically a rule violation, though the FTC's endorsement guidance still expects the incentive to be disclosed inside the review, which no customer will ever do. The Google row is the one that will actually bite a local service business, because Google does not care whether you asked for five stars.

What Google's policy says, word for word

Google's Maps user generated content policy is unusually blunt here. Under prohibited merchant behaviour:

Offer incentives, such as payment, discounts, free goods and/or services, in exchange for posting any review or revision or removal of a negative review.

And in the definition of an incentivized review:

Content that has been posted due to an incentive offered by a business, such as payment, discounts, free goods and/or services. This includes content posted following requests for revision or removal of a review or rating in exchange for an incentive.

Two things follow that owners consistently get wrong.

"Honest review" wording does not save you. The trigger is the customer receiving something of value because they posted. Adding "positive or negative, we just want feedback" removes the sentiment problem and leaves the incentive problem completely intact.

The removal case is covered too. Offering to refund a service fee if someone takes down a one star is the same prohibited act as offering a coupon for posting a five star. If a bad review is what you are actually trying to solve, respond to it properly instead, because the response is read by everyone who lands on the profile afterwards.

What actually happens when you get caught

The vague threat of "penalties" is why owners discount this risk. The specifics are public, because Google wrote them into a regulatory agreement.

In January 2025 the UK Competition and Markets Authority secured signed undertakings from Google covering how it sanctions businesses that manipulate star ratings. The ladder Google committed to:

1. Reviews come down. Quietly, usually with no notification, and they do not come back.
2. A prominent warning alert goes on the profile, visible where your review score is shown, telling searchers that suspicious activity was detected.
3. The review function is deactivated. You cannot receive any new reviews at all for a period.
4. Repeat activity means all reviews deleted for six months or more.

Google told the CMA it planned to expand that sanctions programme to businesses outside the UK, including the EU, by the end of 2025. The escalation is fixed for three years and must remain escalatory.

Step three is the one to sit with. Every real five star review you have earned over eight years is still there, and your ability to add another is switched off, at the moment a competitor is adding four a week. If it escalates to the profile itself, you are then in Google Business Profile suspension territory, which is a much worse week.

Yelp is more public about it. Its Consumer Alerts programme includes a Compensated Activity Alert, a warning message displayed over the reviews on your page when Yelp has evidence that someone offered cash or other incentives in exchange for a review. It is not a quiet suppression. It is a notice to every prospect who lands there.

The FTC angle, and why 2026 changed it

The Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials (16 CFR Part 465) took effect on 21 October 2024. Section 465.4 is the one that applies here, and the exact language matters:

It is an unfair or deceptive act or practice ... 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.

"Conditioned by implication" is doing heavy lifting. A sign at the counter reading "leave us a 5 star review, get 10% off" is express. A card handed only to customers who just said they were delighted, offering money off, is implied. Both land inside the rule.

For most of 2025 this was theoretical. Then it stopped being theoretical:

• December 22, 2025: the FTC sent warning letters to ten companies over practices it believed violated the Rule. FOIA disclosures later revealed who and why. Six went to property management companies, three to personal injury law firms, one to an accounting firm. The alleged conduct was effectively identical across all ten: providing money or other incentives, including lease discounts and gift cards, to customers or employees in exchange for posting positive reviews.
• April 2026: the FTC's complaint against supplement seller TruHeight included the allegation that its site carried reviews from consumers "who were offered a free product or discount in return for a five-star review." The final order in July 2026 carried a $4 million judgment, suspended to $750,000 on inability to pay. The Rule was the only legal basis for the monetary award.
• May 2026: the FTC and the Illinois Attorney General sued Premium Home Service over thousands of fake local business listings for home repair companies, alleging the company directed employees, relatives and SEO vendors to post fake five star reviews. Commissioner Mark Meador's concurring statement named the actual victims: the fraud "diverted these very consumers away from reliable local providers with genuine reviews, harming both the consumers and those providers."

That last case is worth reading twice if you run a trades business. The federal regulator's stated concern in the home services category is that manipulated reviews steal work from operators who earned theirs.

The maximum civil penalty for a violation currently stands at $53,088, per violation, following the FTC's 2025 inflation adjustment. Per violation, in a category where a single campaign generates dozens of them.

In Canada, the exposure is different and larger

Pavado is Canadian and most of our clients are, so this deserves its own note rather than a US-shaped assumption.

Google's policy is global, so nothing above changes at the border. The legal layer does. Section 74.02 of the Competition Act governs testimonials, and the Competition Bureau has been explicit that reviews giving "a false or misleading impression to consumers" create liability for whoever writes them or permits them to be written. In January 2024 the Bureau issued a specific warning about employee-posted reviews, with Commissioner Matthew Boswell stating the Bureau "will not hesitate to vigorously pursue enforcement action against problematic reviews."

The administrative monetary penalties are not small. For a corporation, a first violation reaches the greater of $10 million or three times the benefit derived from the conduct, and $15 million for subsequent violations.

The math nobody runs before printing the coupons

Here is the part that should settle it, independent of any rulebook.

BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey, a representative panel of 1,002 US consumers, found that 78% of consumers were asked to leave a review in the past 12 months, and 83% of the people who were asked went on to leave one. Separately, 28% say they will "always" write a review when asked, up from 16% the year before.

Your customers are not withholding reviews because the incentive is too small. They are withholding them because nobody asked, or asked badly, or asked four days late by email.

The same survey shows the tactic is already dying in the field. The share of consumers who were asked for a review in exchange for a discount fell from 45% in 2024 to 36% in 2025 to 27% in 2026. Meanwhile 11% were offered an incentive specifically for a positive review, which is the group sitting squarely in front of the FTC rule.

And consider what you are buying. 47% of consumers will not use a business with fewer than 20 reviews, and 74% only care about reviews written in the last three months. That is a recency problem and a consistency problem, not a volume problem, which is the same conclusion we reached in how many Google reviews you actually need to rank. A discount campaign produces a spike that decays, on a profile where a spike is itself the suspicious pattern.

The variant most home service companies do not think counts

Ask a contractor whether they incentivize reviews and they will say no. Ask whether their techs get a bonus for reviews that mention them by name, and half will say yes.

Google's policy addresses this directly. Merchants are prohibited from:

requesting that staff solicit a certain number of reviews

and from:

requesting that staff solicit reviews that include specific content, including content that identifies a staff member.

So the name card in the truck, the per-review spiff, and the leaderboard with a bonus attached are all inside the prohibition. An operator in r/smallbusiness who was paying staff per named review got a blunt answer worth quoting:

Paying for reviews, even a $10 spiff to your own staff, runs against Google's review policy, and more practically, a stack of short "Great service, thanks Jackie and Sarah" reviews is exactly the pattern Google's spam filter looks for. Those can get quietly suppressed ... so you might be paying ten bucks a pop for reviews Google is hiding.

There is also a content problem. When you reward the name mention, you get the name mention and nothing else. "Great service, thanks Dave" is worthless to the next customer and worthless to the AI systems now summarising your reviews. "They fixed our AC same day and left the basement cleaner than they found it" is what earns the next call.

The fix keeps the accountability and drops the violation: give each tech their own review link or QR code so attribution happens invisibly, reward the asking rather than the review landing, and coach the ask toward specifics.

Review gating is the same question wearing a different hat

The follow-up question is always some version of "fine, but can I just ask the happy ones?"

Sending a survey first and routing only the satisfied customers to Google is review gating. Google's policy prohibits merchants from discouraging negative reviews or selectively soliciting positive ones. The FTC's warning letters flagged "review gating tools that filter out negative feedback before publication" as a risk practice under the Rule's review suppression provision.

The distinction that survives: you can resolve a complaint before you ask, and you can decline to chase a review from a job that went sideways. What you cannot do is build a machine whose job is to route sentiment. One is judgement, the other is a system, and Google can see the second one in your review pattern.

Note that suppressing a review you believe is fake is explicitly carved out of the FTC's suppression rule, which is why flagging an actually fraudulent review is a different activity entirely from gating.

What you can pay for instead

Move the incentive off the review. You can spend money on almost anything else in the customer relationship, because the prohibited act is specifically compensating the posting, revision or removal of a review.

One operator on r/GeneralContractor described getting sanctioned for a review discount and switching the same offer to a photo upload discount instead: "That worked even better and doesn't violate any rules." That is the pattern. Find the adjacent action you are allowed to pay for.

If your volume is genuinely stuck, the fix is mechanical rather than financial, and it is covered end to end in our guide on how to get more Google reviews as a contractor. Ask on the day of service. Use a direct link, not "search for us on Google." Follow up once. Respond to every review that lands.

If you already ran a discount-for-reviews promotion

Most owners reading this have already done it, usually years ago, usually on a counter card nobody has looked at since. A short cleanup:

1. Take the offer down everywhere. Counter signage, invoice footers, the post-job text template, the QR card in the truck, the automated email sequence. Read the sequence yourself rather than assuming.
2. Stop the internal version too. Any per-review bonus, any target number for staff, any script that asks customers to name the technician.
3. Do not delete the reviews you already have. They are the customers' content, and mass removal requests are their own suspicious pattern. Stop the input, leave the record.
4. Do not ask customers to edit or remove anything. That request is itself the prohibited act, in both rulebooks.
5. Write down what happened and when you stopped. If a profile restriction lands later, an appeal that shows a dated remediation is a materially better appeal.
6. Replace it with an ask. Same day, direct link, one follow-up. Then watch whether the volume actually falls, because it usually does not.

The honest summary

The question "should I offer a discount for a review" is really "is my review volume worth the risk to my profile."

It is not, and the reason is that the risk is asymmetric in the ugliest way. The upside is a handful of extra reviews that decay in relevance within three months. The downside is a warning banner on the profile that sends your leads to a competitor, an inability to collect new reviews during your busy season, and in the US a per-violation penalty regime that a regulator started actively mailing letters about in December 2025.

Meanwhile the boring version works. Ask everyone, the day of the job, with a link that opens the form in one tap. Four in five will do it for free.