An incentivised review is a customer review written in exchange for something of value: a discount on the next order, a free product, an entry into a prize draw, loyalty points or plain cash. The reward may be offered for any review, or only for a positive one, and it may or may not be disclosed to readers.
How incentivised reviews work
The usual pattern is an email or card after a purchase: “Leave us a review and get 10% off your next order.” Some businesses offer a reward only once a review is posted; others enter every reviewer into a monthly draw. Marketplaces and product sampling schemes sometimes give away free products to people who agree to review them.
The problem is that a reward changes what people write and who bothers to write at all. Readers assume reviews reflect unprompted experience, so a hidden incentive misleads them even if each reviewer is honest.
What UK law says
The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 added fake reviews and concealed incentivised reviews to the list of commercial practices that are banned in all circumstances. The ban took effect in April 2025. It covers commissioning or publishing them, and publishing reviews in a way that misleads consumers. The Competition and Markets Authority can now enforce consumer law directly, including fines of up to 10% of a business’s global turnover, and it has published guidance on what businesses and review platforms must do.
What the platforms say
Platform rules are stricter than the law. Google’s policies for Business Profile reviews prohibit offering or accepting money, products or services in return for a review, disclosed or not. Trustpilot‘s guidelines for businesses also say not to offer incentives in exchange for reviews. Read the current wording of each platform you use, because breaking them can lead to reviews being removed or warnings shown on your profile.
Why it matters
Reviews are one of the strongest reasons a customer chooses one local business over another. A rating built partly on rewards is fragile: platforms remove reviews they detect, the CMA can act, and a public warning on your profile does more damage than a slightly lower score ever would.
It also differs from review gating, where a business asks everyone for feedback but only sends happy customers to the review site. Gating needs no reward, but it distorts the picture in a similar way and is against Google’s policies too.
Common mistakes
- Offering a discount “for a 5-star review”, which is both an incentive and a condition on the content.
- Running a prize draw for reviewers on Google, assuming a draw is not a reward.
- Giving staff bonuses tied to customers leaving reviews that name them, without checking the rules.
- Copying review tactics from US or other overseas sources that do not reflect UK law.
- Thinking disclosure makes an incentive acceptable on platforms that ban incentives entirely.
How to act on it
Review every request you send: emails, receipts, cards, QR codes and staff scripts. Remove any reward linked to leaving a review. Then make asking easy and universal: send every customer the same short request with a direct link, at the moment the job is finished or the order arrives, and accept whatever they write.
A steady, honest review generation process and replies to every review are part of the Google Business Profile optimisation I do for UK businesses.