How to get more reviews for your business: a weekly routine
How to get more reviews for your business with a 45-minute weekly routine: who to ask, when, three templates, and the lines Google's review policy forbids.
Written by OpenRated Team You have nine reviews. The newest is from March, and the business has served a few hundred people since then. You asked once, in a newsletter, and got nothing. So how do you get more reviews for your business without nagging, paying, or leaning on the three customers who already love you?
The answer is dull, which is why most businesses do not do it: ask every customer, at the moment they have the result in their hands, with a link that opens the form, and do it every week, because reviews age. Below is that routine, about 45 minutes a week, with the timing for your kind of business, three templates, a before-and-after of the ask, and the lines the platforms forbid.
Asking works, and a routine beats a campaign
Most guides say "ask" and stop there. The figures say how much it matters. BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (published 11 February 2026, 1,002 US adult consumers) found that 78% of consumers had been asked to leave feedback for a business in the past 12 months, and that 28% say they will always write a review if asked, up from 16% in the 2025 edition. The same survey found that 74% of consumers look for reviews written in the last three months.
That last figure is why this is a routine and not a campaign. Forty reviews collected in one push in January read as stale by May. Eight a month, every month, never do.
One caution on the source. The survey page gives two different figures for how many people wrote a review after being asked, 65% in one section and 83% in another. Take the direction rather than the number: well over half of the people you ask will do it.
Settle three things once, before the first ask
Which site. Ask on the site your customers already use to choose a business like yours, and send everyone to one place at a time: for a cafe, a clinic or a plumber, usually the business profile on the search engine and map app they found you on; for a shop selling through a marketplace, the marketplace's own review; for a software company, the review platform a buyer checks before booking a demo. Splitting one week's asks across four sites gets you four thin profiles instead of one a stranger trusts.
One link that opens the form. A business profile on Google gives you a link or QR code to request reviews (Google's own help page, read 5 October 2026), and every extra tap between the message and the form loses people. Put that link on the phone of everyone who talks to customers: on an iPhone, a text replacement (Settings, General, Keyboard, Text Replacement) turns a shortcut like "revlink" into the full link, so the ask goes out from the van or the counter in two taps. Print the same link as a QR code for the till.
The rules of that site, read once. Google's policy for user contributed content lists, under "Rating manipulation", three things a business may not do: offer incentives such as payment, discounts or free goods in exchange for any review; discourage or prohibit negative reviews or selectively solicit positive ones; and post reviews based on a conflict of interest, which includes current or former employment. So no discount for a review, no "only ask the happy ones", and no reviews from your staff. Other platforms publish their own versions, and whether a business may pay for reviews at all is a post of its own. None of this is legal advice; it is the rules as the platforms publish them.
Where the ask comes from differs by platform, and so does what you control:
| Where your customers are | Who sends the ask | What you control | Read before you write |
|---|---|---|---|
| A business profile on a search engine or map app | You, with the profile's share link | The moment, the wording, the channel | The platform's content policy: no incentives, no gating, no staff reviews |
| A social page (recommendations on a Facebook page, for example) | You, with the page's reviews link | The same, sent to buyers rather than followers | The page's community rules on solicited recommendations |
| A marketplace (Etsy, eBay, Amazon, Depop and the like) | Mostly the marketplace, after delivery | The delivery experience, the packing slip, and any message the seller rules allow | The seller policy on contacting buyers and on reviews; the marketplace sets the window and the wording |
| An industry review platform (software, travel, trades) | You, often through the platform's own request tool | Which customers, and when | The platform's rules on who may review and how it checks them |
The marketplace row is the one most guides leave out. On a marketplace you do not own the review request; the platform prompts the buyer in its own words at its own time. Your lever is everything before that prompt: the item arriving on time and as described, a packing slip that says a review helps a small shop, and a message that stays inside the seller rules, read before you write a line, because a marketplace can act against the seller account itself.
How to get more reviews for your business: the weekly routine
Four fixed slots, about 45 minutes in total. The minutes are an estimate for a business asking 20 to 40 customers a week; a bigger list takes longer at the ask and reply steps, not at the others.
Monday, 10 minutes: list last week's customers. Pull everyone whose work finished last week: orders delivered, jobs signed off, tickets closed, stays ended. Everyone, not the happiest. Picking only the customers you expect to be pleased is the "selectively solicit positive reviews" line in the policy above, and it shows on the page too: a profile with nothing but five-star raves reads as curated. A customer who complained during the job gets a call first and the same ask once the problem is fixed, not a quiet removal from the list.
Tuesday, 15 minutes: send the ask. One message per customer, on the channel they already used with you: text if you texted about the job, email if the order confirmation went by email, in person if they are at the counter. The templates are below. Tuesday because the Monday list is fresh and the job is still days old; your Friday sheet will tell you whether another day works better for your customers.
Thursday, 5 minutes: remind once. One reminder, two days later, to those who have not reviewed, and then stop. A second reminder is nagging, and the people who give in to nagging are not the people who write something useful.
Friday, 15 minutes: reply and record. Reply to every new review: a positive one in a line that names the thing they praised, a negative one in full, calmly, with what you did about it. Then log the week in a sheet: who was asked, on which channel, and who reviewed. That sheet is the only way you will know which moment and which channel work for your customers.
Outside the weekly loop, once a month, give the sheet twenty minutes: which channel got the most replies, which moment produced them, and whether your profile still shows the right hours, phone number and photos. A routine that asks 30 people a week and gets a third to write is ten reviews a week, every one of them inside the three-month window readers look for.
When to ask, by the kind of business
The right moment is when the customer has the result in their hands and the memory is fresh. The moment differs by what you sell, and so does the channel; the table says where to start, and your Friday sheet says whether you were right.
| Kind of business | Ask at | Not at | Channel |
|---|---|---|---|
| A shop or cafe | The till, or two days after a delivery arrives | The moment of purchase, before they have used the thing | QR at the counter; text after delivery |
| A trade or service (cleaner, plumber, decorator) | The walk-through at the end of the job, while you are both looking at the result | The invoice email a week later | Text, from the van |
| An agency or consultancy (clients) | The milestone sign-off, when the client has just said the work landed | The renewal or the invoice conversation | A personal email from the account lead |
| A software company | The first measurable success: the first report sent, the first campaign launched, the first integration live | Signup, before they have used it | In-app prompt or email, at the event |
| A hotel, rental or restaurant (guests) | Checkout, or the next morning | Mid-stay, while the experience is unfinished | Text or email, with the link |
| A clinic or practice (patients) | After the visit, on a channel the practice already uses with patients | During treatment | Text or email; ask about the experience and never name a treatment, and check the privacy rules for your sector first |
A software company gets its own post in this cluster, because the ask runs through the product and the review platforms have their own checks on who may review.
The ask itself: three templates and a before-and-after
Here is the ask most businesses send, with every problem it carries:
Hi! If you loved working with us, we'd be so grateful for a 5-star review on Google! As a thank you, here's 10% off your next order.
"If you loved" is gating. "5-star" asks for a score rather than an account of what happened, and tells the lukewarm customer that anything less is unwelcome. The discount is the incentive the policy names first. Three rules broken in two sentences.
The fixed version:
Hi Dana, thanks for choosing us for the kitchen repaint. Would you write a short review of how it went? This link opens the form and it takes about two minutes: [link]. An honest review is what helps us most. Sam
Named sender, the specific job, one link, a time estimate, and "honest" instead of "5-star". That is the shape of all three templates.
Text (the Tuesday ask):
Hi [first name], it's [your name] from [business]. Thanks for [the job or order]. Would you write a short review of how it went? [link] takes about two minutes. Honest is what helps.
Email (where the order or the work ran by email):
Subject: Two minutes for a review of [the job]?
Hi [first name],
[The job] finished on [day] and I hope the [result] is doing what you needed. If you have two minutes, a short review of how it went helps the next person decide: [link].
Write what you actually think; an honest review is more use to us than a kind one.
[Your name], [business]
In person (the counter or the walk-through):
"Reviews are how people find us. If you'd write one about today, this code opens the form and it takes a couple of minutes." Then hand over the card and stop talking.
The Thursday reminder is the text template with one change at the front: "Just once more, in case it got buried." Nothing else.
What this routine will not fix
Asking everyone means honest reviews, and honest reviews include the bad ones. If a third of your customers are unhappy, the routine tells the world faster than silence would. A request for reviews does not rescue a product people dislike; it documents it. Fix the thing first, then ask.
It will not fix a listing on the wrong site. Thirty reviews on a platform your customers never open are thirty reviews nobody reads, so the "which site" decision above is worth an hour.
It costs what it looks like: 45 minutes of one person's week, every week, including the week two staff are off and the till is broken. The Monday list is the step to protect, because once the list exists the other three are hard to skip.
And it should not produce a tidy flood. Ask as the work completes, not in a batch at month end, so the reviews land the way real customers write them: a few at a time, spread through the month.
When the routine outgrows a spreadsheet
At a few dozen asks a week, one location and one person, the sheet is fine. At several locations, or more asks than one person can send by hand on a Tuesday, the routine moves into reputation and review management software. The checklist every product in that category is compared on includes the rows this routine needs: review request campaigns by SMS and email, QR code review requests, CRM and POS triggered requests (the Monday list built for you), new review alerts, replying to reviews from one inbox, and multi-site review monitoring. Compare products on those rows at reputation and review management software.
One row deserves care: private negative feedback capture. A tool that shows the public review link only to customers who first rated you well is doing what the policy above calls selectively soliciting positive reviews. Ask everyone the same way, and offer a private feedback form beside the public ask, never in front of it.
The next step
Pick the one site your customers use, make the link, and put it on every phone today. On Monday, list last week's customers. On Tuesday, send the text template to all of them. That first week is the whole method; the rest is doing it again.
