Federal Law Alert
Star gating violates the FTC Consumer Review Fairness Act. Penalties reach $50,120 per violation. Google can suspend your listing. Many popular review platforms do this by default.
Star gating (also called review gating) is one of the most widespread illegal practices in online reputation management — and most businesses using it do not know it is against federal law.
Star gating is the practice of pre-screening customers based on inferred satisfaction before deciding whether to show them a review platform link.
The typical workflow looks like this:
Business sends customer a satisfaction survey or star rating prompt
Customer rates their experience (before seeing any review link)
If 4-5 stars → customer sees Google review link
ILLEGAL: If 1-3 stars → customer is redirected to private form or sees nothing
The result is that only positive reviews reach Google. Negative reviews are filtered out. The FTC explicitly targets this practice.
The FTC Consumer Review Fairness Act (CRFA), signed into law on December 14, 2016, makes it a federal violation to use any contract provision or platform mechanism that:
FTC Penalty: Civil penalties up to $50,120 per violation. For businesses running systematic review gating campaigns across thousands of customer interactions, total liability can reach into the millions. The business using the platform — not just the platform — is liable.
These platforms include satisfaction surveys or sentiment pre-screening before presenting Google review links — the definition of star gating:
Using any of these platforms does not protect you from FTC liability. The business operator is ultimately responsible.
Independent of FTC law, Google's review policies explicitly prohibit "review gating" — defined as discouraging or preventing negative reviews while soliciting positive ones. Violations can result in:
The FTC-compliant approach shows every customer the same two options, simultaneously, with equal visual weight:
Path A: Public Review
Direct link to Google review page — every customer always sees this option
Path B: Private Feedback
Direct message to management — every customer always sees this option too
This is legal because no customer is filtered out of the review path. Unhappy customers who choose the private path do so voluntarily — not because it was the only option shown to them. ReviewShielder's QR code implements this exact design.
ReviewShielder never star gates. FTC compliant by design. $99/month.
Get FTC-Compliant Reviews