Should you offer a discount in exchange for a review?

People ask this one quietly, like it might be a dumb question. It is not a dumb question. It is the most reasonable idea in the world. You do good work, the customer is happy, you would like them to say so where the next customer can see it, and ten percent off the next job seems like a fair trade for two minutes of their time.

Do not do it. Not because it is wrong, though it is a little wrong, but because it is the one shortcut in this whole business that can cost you the thing you were trying to build.

What Google does

Google's review policy prohibits offering anything of value for a review. Money, a discount, a free service, entry in a raffle. It does not matter whether you asked for a five star review or just a review; the offer itself is the violation. When Google's filters catch it, and they are catching more of it every year, the reviews come down. Not the ones you paid for. All of them, sometimes, and in the bad cases the Business Profile goes with them.

Think about what that means for a plumber with 140 reviews built over nine years. A summer of "leave us a review and get $20 off your next visit" on the back of the invoice can take the 140 with it. Google does not sort the honest ones from the bought ones. It removes the profile's reviews and lets you argue about it afterwards, through a form, with nobody to call.

The businesses this happens to almost never think of it as buying reviews. They think of it as a thank-you. Google reads it the way the policy is written.

What the FTC does

In the United States this stopped being only a platform rule in October 2024, when the Federal Trade Commission's rule on fake reviews and testimonials took effect. Among other things, it bans buying reviews, and it bans conditioning a reward on the review being positive. A discount offered to anyone who writes a review, good or bad, sits in a grey area under that rule. A discount offered "for a five star review" is squarely inside it, and the rule carries civil penalties per violation.

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. It is a plain reading of a rule the FTC published in full, and the direction of travel is not ambiguous. Every year the cost of being clever about reviews goes up.

Why it also does not work

Set the rules aside for a second, because the argument does not depend on them.

A review written for a discount reads like a review written for a discount. "Great service, would recommend, five stars." No detail, because the person was not moved to write, they were paid to. And the reader can tell. Not consciously, most of the time. They just skim past it the way you skim past a billboard, and their eye lands on the one review that says "he showed me the cracked fitting before he replaced it, and the bill was what he said on the phone." That one was free.

I wrote at length about why fake testimonials are obvious. Incentivised ones are not fake, but they fail the same test for the same reason: nothing specific happened in them.

What to do instead

The thing that works costs nothing and most businesses never do it.

Ask on the day. The customer's goodwill is at its highest in the hour after you leave and it fades fast. A text that afternoon gets a reply. An email the following Tuesday gets deleted. The people who are going to write one mostly do it soon after they are asked, so a lot of the reviews you do not have are the ones you asked for too late.

Send the link, not the instruction. "Leave us a review on Google" makes the customer go and find you. The direct link opens the review box on their phone, signed in, with nothing to search for. If you do not have that link, this page makes it from your Place ID, along with a QR code for the invoice, and it is free.

Give them the sentence. People freeze at a blank box. "If you have a minute, would you mention the thing about the old part?" turns a blank box into a fill-in-the-blank, and it produces exactly the specific line that makes a stranger believe it.

Ask twice, then stop. One text the same day, one a week later, and then leave it. Anyone who has not done it after two asks is not going to, and a third ask costs you goodwill you will want for the next job.

Do those four things for a season and you will have more reviews than the discount would have bought, none of them at risk, and every one of them with a detail in it, because nobody wrote one for the money.

The one exception people ask about

"What if I offer the discount to everyone, whether or not they write anything?" That is a loyalty discount, and it is fine, and it is also not what anyone means when they ask this question. If the discount shows up on the same card or in the same text as the review ask, it is an incentive whatever you call it. Keep them on different days and different pieces of paper or do not do it.

The reviews you collect this way stay on Google, which is where they belong. The same one-link, same-day ask also works for your own website, which is the part Exalted does, and the rule there is the same: nobody gets paid for a word of it.