Review gating and UK consumer law: what you can and cannot do

The rules changed in a way many small businesses have not caught up with. The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 introduced a ban on fake and misleading consumer reviews, and the main provisions came into force on 6 April 2025. The Competition and Markets Authority, which enforces it, published detailed guidance on what businesses must and must not do, and it can impose penalties of up to 10% of a business's annual global turnover without going to court first, so this is not a theoretical risk for a smaller operator.

Gating is not always named as a single banned act, but it falls squarely inside what the law does prohibit. The Act treats misleading review information as an offence, and that includes presenting reviews in a way that suppresses genuine negative ones or gives a false impression of a product or service. A system built to keep unhappy customers off your public profile is doing exactly that. The safest reading, and the one the CMA's guidance on fake and misleading reviews supports, is that steering negative feedback away from the public record is a form of the concealment the regime is designed to stop.

Even before the law, gating breached Google's own rules. Google's policy is that businesses must not discourage or prohibit negative reviews, and must not selectively solicit positive reviews from customers, which is precisely what a filter step does. The Google review policies for businesses set this out plainly, and enforcement is not limited to removing the odd review.

The consequences escalate. Google can strip affected reviews, apply a warning to the profile, or in serious or repeated cases suspend it altogether, and a suspended Google Business Profile can vanish from Maps and the local pack overnight while you work through an appeal. So a tactic sold as protecting your rating can end up costing you the profile that carries it, on top of the consumer-law exposure. There is no version of gating that is safe on both fronts at once.

None of this means you have to sit back and hope reviews arrive. Asking for reviews is entirely legitimate, and the businesses that ask well end up with far more of them. The line is simple. You can ask, and you can make it effortless. What you cannot do is decide in advance who gets asked based on how you expect them to answer.

The same regime that catches gating also tightened the rules on paying for reviews. Offering a discount, a prize draw entry or a freebie in exchange for a review is not automatically banned, but the review must still be genuine and the incentive must be disclosed prominently and unambiguously, so anyone reading it knows it was rewarded. A hidden incentive, where the reader has no idea the reviewer got something for it, is treated as a concealed incentive and is prohibited.

For most local businesses the cleaner answer is to avoid incentives entirely. The disclosure has to be so prominent that it dents the credibility of the review anyway, and an unincentivised review from a real customer is both more persuasive and completely safe. If you do run an offer, treat the disclosure as non-negotiable and never tie the reward to leaving a positive review specifically, because rewarding only five-star ratings is gating by another name.

If you recognise your own process here, the fix is quick and worth doing now that enforcement has begun. Audit any reviews tool or automation you use and find the branching step, the point where a rating or a yes/no question decides whether someone reaches your public review link. Remove that branch so every customer gets the same route to the same public option, and if you keep a private feedback form, present it to everyone rather than only to those who signalled dissatisfaction.

Handled properly, reviews are one of the strongest local signals you actually control, feeding the prominence that lifts you in the Enfield map pack and reassuring the searcher who is comparing you against two competitors. That only holds if the profile carrying them is clean. The reviews sit on your Google Business Profile, so protecting that profile from a policy strike is part of the same job as staying inside consumer law. Both point to the same conclusion: ask everyone, disclose anything you incentivise, and let the honest picture stand.