How to get more Google reviews without breaking Google’s rules

You can get more Google reviews without breaking Google’s rules by doing three things: ask every patient (not a hand-picked few), make leaving a review take under a minute, and never offer anything in return. Google’s rules forbid buying, faking and filtering reviews – they have never forbidden simply asking. The gap between practices with 12 reviews and practices with 200 is almost never quality of care; it is whether anyone asks.

What Google actually forbids

The policy is shorter than most people fear. You must not:

• Offer incentives. No discounts, prize draws, free whitening or “money off your next visit” in exchange for a review – even a five-word one.
• Review-gate. You cannot ask only your happy patients, or show the Google link only to people who first rated you highly in a survey. Everyone you ask must have the same route to Google. Under the UK’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act – in force for reviews since April 2025, with CMA guidance in CMA208 – hiding negative reviews or selectively soliciting positive ones is a banned practice in its own right, not just a Google-policy issue.
• Write or commission fake reviews. No staff, family or agencies posting as patients.
• Ask people to change or remove honest negative reviews in exchange for anything.

Everything else – texting a link, printing a QR poster, adding a line to your email footer – is allowed. Practices sometimes hear “you can’t ask for reviews” from a well-meaning colleague; that is a myth in Google’s case.

Why asking works so well in healthcare

Patients read reviews before they read anything else about you: 71% check online reviews as the very first step in finding a new doctor (Software Advice), and 76% of consumers regularly read reviews for local businesses (BrightLocal 2023). Yet most happy patients never write one – not from reluctance, but because nobody made it easy at the moment they felt grateful. Frustrated patients, meanwhile, go looking for the review box on their own. Asking everyone simply corrects that imbalance.

The compliant ask, word for word

Keep it neutral. You are asking for feedback, not for five stars. Copy these and swap in your details:

• Text message: “Thanks for visiting [practice name] today. If you have 20 seconds, we’d value your feedback: [link].”
• Email footer: “How did we do? Leave feedback in 20 seconds: [link].”
• QR poster by the door: “How was your visit? Scan to tell us – it takes 20 seconds.”

Notice what these never say: “leave us a 5-star review”, “if you were happy, review us on Google”, or anything that hints the invitation depends on the patient’s mood. Neutral wording keeps you inside the rules and, in practice, reads better to patients anyway.

Make the route effortless

Every extra tap loses people. Point every ask at one short link – ideally a simple “Review us” page where the patient taps a star rating and, if they choose five, lands straight in the Google review box with one more tap. A patient who has to search for your practice, find the right listing and hunt for the review button will mostly give up, however pleased they were.

Give unhappy patients a private route too – openly

Your feedback page can, and should, offer a private route to the practice manager alongside the public one. The rule is that it must be an addition, not a diversion: a patient who wants to post on Google must always be able to. Done this way, you hear about problems early and privately – while staying entirely inside Google’s policy.

Then keep responding

Volume is half the picture; visible attentiveness is the other half. Reply briefly and courteously to reviews as they arrive – businesses that respond to reviews are viewed as 1.7× more trustworthy (Google/Ipsos). With NHS.uk having closed its public star-ratings in 2025, your Google profile is now the main public record of what patients think. Steady honest asking, one easy link, no shortcuts: that is how it grows.