Online Reputation Management: Protecting Your Brand

Reputation management is one of the few marketing areas with actual law attached to it, and most small businesses are operating on advice that predates the law. Since October 2024 several common review tactics carry federal civil penalties in the United States. This article covers what you may do to generate reviews, what you may not, and what your realistic options are when a review is genuinely false.

What the FTC rule prohibits, specifically

The FTC’s Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, 16 CFR Part 465, took effect on 21 October 2024. Knowing violations expose a business to civil penalties, and the FTC’s inflation-adjusted maximum rose to $53,088 per violation from 17 January 2025. The prohibited categories are worth reading as a list, because several of them are practices that were once routine advice.

Note the suppression provision in particular. Sending a lawyer’s letter over an unfavourable but honest review is not merely bad practice now, it is potentially the violation. So is displaying only your four and five star reviews on a page implying it shows all of them.

Google’s policies are stricter than many owners assume

Independently of federal law, Google’s Business Profile prohibited and restricted content policy bans fake engagement, impersonation, and rating manipulation, which expressly includes incentivised reviews and reviews from people with a conflict of interest such as current or former employment or a contractual relationship. Google’s position is that merchants may encourage genuine reviews but may not offer incentives, including payment, discounts, or free goods and services. A prize draw for reviewers is an incentive.

When a review is false: what actually works

Flagging is the first step and it is worth doing, but calibrate your expectations: reviews are removed for policy violation, not for being unfair or inaccurate, and a negative but honest account of a real experience violates nothing. Where Google finds no violation on initial review, a single appeal is available and that is the end of the internal process.

For genuinely defamatory content the route is Google’s legal removal process rather than the policy queue. Google does not adjudicate whether a statement is defamatory, so in practice these requests succeed when accompanied by a court order, and are commonly declined without one. That is a legal project with legal costs, and it should be weighed against the alternative, which is usually cheaper and more effective: bury the single bad review under a flow of recent genuine ones and a good public reply.

Generating reviews legally

1. Ask every customer, not only the ones you expect to be happy. Selective solicitation is what turns into a rating manipulation problem.
2. Ask at the moment of delivered value, not at invoicing. A post-purchase email sequence handles the timing automatically.
3. Make it one tap. Link directly to the review form, not to your profile.
4. Never condition anything on the content or star rating. No discount, no draw, no free item, in any form.
5. Reply to everything within a set window, and reply to the negative ones as if writing to the next twenty readers rather than the complainant.

Mara Whitfield

Brand Strategy Lead

Mara Whitfield leads brand strategy at ThisCom, helping small and medium businesses build distinctive brands and consistent digital presences that earn trust and stand out.

All articles by Mara Whitfield →