The reviews you should never ask for

There is a list of people who should never review your business, and most of it is people who like you: your staff, your family, your friends, your vendors, and the marketing agency you hired. None of them are neutral, all of them are motivated, and a rating’s entire value is that the person giving it had nothing to gain.

The system for earning reviews the legitimate way already covers buying, swapping and faking. This post is about the softer version nobody thinks of as faking: the sincere five-star from someone with a stake.

Your employees

The person on your payroll benefits directly from the business looking good. That is the definition of a conflicted rating, and it does not stop being one because the employee genuinely loves the job. Google’s rating manipulation policy — the same one that catches review gating — covers attempts to directly or indirectly influence a star rating, and a staff review influences it as directly as anything can.

The tempting version is the new hire asked to “help get us started.” Ten reviews from accounts that share a workplace is a pattern, and patterns are what automated detection is built to find.

Your family and friends

The test is not the relationship; it is the transaction. A brother-in-law who actually paid for a detail can describe the detail. A brother-in-law who was asked to “leave us five stars real quick” is describing nothing — the review exists because of the relationship, which is the same reason the fake ones exist.

Home care makes this concrete, and uncomfortable. Caregivers’ own relatives are the easiest people to ask, and agencies do it. But the family reading those reviews is choosing who enters their parent’s home, and they are reading on the assumption that other families wrote them. A review that breaks that assumption is not a harmless favor.

Your vendors and trade partners

The supplier who wants to keep the account, the subcontractor you refer work to, the shop across town you trade overflow with — each has a relationship with your revenue, and a standing reason to round up. Review-swapping between businesses is already on the never-do list; the vendor five-star is the same exchange with the paperwork implied.

The agency you hired

If a marketing company offers to leave — or worse, to supply — reviews as part of onboarding, that is the whole audit you need of how they work. A vendor rating its own client is conflicted in both directions: they are paid by you, and their work is what the rating reflects on. We answer reviews on the profiles we manage; we do not write any, and no legitimate provider does.

Who that leaves

Customers. Only customers. Which is the dull, correct answer: the entire job of a review profile is to be a record of transactions, and every name above fails that test before they type a word. The ask-system that puts real customers in front of the link every week is slower than any shortcut on this list, and it is the only one that survives being looked at.

If the review side of your profile needs a system rather than a favor — the ask, the link, and every reply handled — that is work we run, on every plan. The customers write the reviews. Nobody else should.