How we handle your reviews

Three stars and up, we draft a reply for you. One and two stars, we never reply in public, at any age. That single line explains almost everything else on this page.

A public argument under a bad review is read by every customer who comes after it. So the answer to a low-star review is not a paragraph. It is a petition to Google where there is a case, a notice to you where there is not, and the three steps you can take from your own Google account.

When you connect your Google Business Profile we read every review on the listing and store all of them. Not the last six months, not the last hundred. All of them, including the ones already answered and the ones you answered yourself.

That matters on the day you decide whether this was worth it. A business moving to us with nine years of reviews should see nine years on the reviews page, not a recent-reviews widget.

A reply answers the person, not the room. The first sentence responds to what this reviewer actually said and names what the visit was for. It adds one thing a stranger reading before booking would want to know, and then it stops.

It is written from what we hold about you: your services, your brand rules, the facts you have filed. Openings are checked against the replies already on your listing, so three reviews in a row do not all begin the same way.

The pass runs every three hours and will draft at most twenty replies for you in one run. Replies to reviews older than six months are capped further, at five a day.

Someone who reviews you today still gets an answer today. Only the archive drips. A listing that answers nine years of reviews inside a day reads as a machine working through a backlog, which is exactly what it would be.

• It is read against Google review policy, if it arrived in the last six months. A competitor smear, harassment or spam is a policy case; a genuine unhappy customer is not, and we say which one it is.
• Where there is a case, a removal petition is written and assigned to one of our people. Google has no removal API, so a human submits it by hand. It is a petition, never an automatic removal, and we never tell you it worked before it did.
• You get an email about it, usually within hours. It carries what the review says, where the petition stands, and the steps to report it from your own Google account, because some of those are yours to file and not ours.
• No public reply is drafted. Not now, not later.

One exception to the email: a low-star review already more than a fortnight old on the day we first read it is flagged on your reviews page without a message. Most of what a listing brings with it on the day you connect is old, and "a 1-star review came in" about something from two years ago is alarming and untrue.

Each draft reaches your approvals queue and your inbox. Edit the wording and your version is what publishes. Decline it and nothing goes up, and what you said in declining becomes a standing rule for the next one.

Review replies are one of the few things that publish on their own. Leave a reply to a three, four or five star review alone for three business days and it goes up, because a happy customer waiting on an answer is the worse outcome. Switch that off in settings and every reply waits for you instead. A reply to a low-star review could never reach that timer, because none is ever drafted.

Your reviews page carries your review link: a short address, a QR code and a printable poster. It is the same link however you hand it over, so the reviews come back to one place.