The FTC's Fake Review Rule, Explained: What It Means for Review Gating

The FTC's Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials took effect October 21, 2024, and it's the FTC's first rule specifically targeting fake and manipulated reviews — meaning violations can carry civil penalties, not just a strongly worded letter. It bans several practices that were previously just discouraged, and a surprising number of small businesses are still doing at least one of them without realizing it's now a compliance issue, not just a bad look.

• Buying, selling, or writing fake reviews and testimonials — including reviews from employees or insiders without clearly disclosing the connection.
• Offering compensation or incentives conditioned on a review being positive (or negative).
• Using legal threats, intimidation, or false accusations to get a negative review taken down.
• Displaying only a subset of reviews on your own site in a way that misrepresents them as "all" or "most" of what customers actually submitted — i.e., suppressing the negative ones while implying the display is complete.
• Buying or selling fake social media engagement (bot followers, fake views) tied to reviews or testimonials.

There's a real distinction the rule draws that's worth being precise about: routing a happy customer toward your public Google listing and an unhappy one toward a private feedback form is not the same as suppressing or deleting a review that already exists. The rule targets removing, hiding, or falsely representing reviews that were already submitted — not shaping which channel a request for feedback goes to before anything's been posted.

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