The FTC's rule on consumer reviews and testimonials: what a contractor may not buy, write, or suppress

A high average rating is not worth building on an account the customer never gave. A federal rule has covered this since October 21, 2024.[1] Among other things, it prohibits selling or buying fake or false customer reviews or endorsement content, buying reviews conditioned on their sentiment, company insiders posting reviews or endorsements without disclosing their relationship to the business, a company-controlled site or entity that falsely claims to be independent, certain review-suppression practices, and buying or selling fake indicators of social-media influence.[2] Courts can impose civil penalties for a knowing violation.[3]

This guide translates the rule’s own categories into operating decisions for a contractor. It is general information about a federal rule, not legal advice, and reading it does not establish compliance. FTC staff says its own published guidance “isn’t definitive or comprehensive” and “doesn’t provide a safe harbor from potential liability.”[3]

Two different things share one rule

The rule treats a customer’s account posted to a platform built for collecting such accounts — a review site, or the review section of a retailer’s own page — differently from a promotional claim attributed to a customer or a well-known person and used in marketing, which can appear in an ad, on the business’s own website, or on social media.[3] Most of one are not the other, but a review that a business pays or gives an incentive for counts as both.[3]

That split matters for who is on the hook. A retailer that only hosts reviews submitted by real customers generally is not liable under the rule for one that turns out to be fake, as long as the business did not write or buy it.[3] Featuring a customer’s account in your own advertising is a different act: at that point the business is publishing the claim, not merely hosting it, and can be liable if the underlying account is fake or false.[3]

Start with whether the person and the experience are real

Do not write an account for a customer, invent a homeowner, buy a package of reviews, or publish a customer-attributed claim from someone who did not have the experience described. The rule’s center of gravity is the mismatch between the public claim and the underlying person or experience.

That boundary matters when a marketing vendor offers “review generation.” A contractor should ask what the vendor actually does — does it contact real customers who completed real work, and does each one choose whether to respond and what to say, or does the vendor supply finished wording for people to post? FTC staff describes the signals that should prompt a closer look at a batch of purchased reviews: they arrive too soon after a sale to reflect a real experience, an unusually large number appear in a short window, or they describe the wrong product or job.[3] A vendor’s label is not evidence that its method is lawful.

An incentive cannot depend on sentiment

Incentives for reviews are not categorically prohibited, but a business cannot expressly or implicitly require a particular sentiment to qualify.[3] Promising a reward only if the customer says they loved the job, or wording the offer so praise is the understood condition, crosses that line even without saying so outright.[3] Expecting that an incentivized review will probably be positive is not, by itself, the same as requiring it to be.[3]

For a contractor, the clean operating rule is simpler than the legal edge cases: do not condition an incentive on the answer. If an incentive is offered at all, it should not change based on whether the customer turns out to be happy, neutral, or critical, and the incentive itself should be disclosed — failing to disclose it can raise a separate issue under general FTC consumer-protection authority even when the review rule itself is satisfied.[3]

A review request can be direct without steering the answer:

If you would like to share your experience, here is our review link. Please describe the work in your own words.

That request asks for an account of the job. It does not supply the verdict.

Employees, relatives, and agents are not ordinary customers

A real person can still create a misleading review when their relationship to the company is hidden. FTC staff says a small-business owner may ask family members for reviews, but the relationship should be clearly and conspicuously disclosed.[3] A generalized request sent to every recent customer — one that happens to reach an employee or relative along with everyone else — does not itself violate this part of the rule; the exposure comes from a targeted insider post that hides the relationship.[3]

The safer contractor policy is to keep insiders out of a dedicated review-solicitation program, or to make the relationship visible in the post itself when an insider’s account is used. Under the rule’s own definition, a disclosure a reader must click or hover to see is not clear and conspicuous at all, so place it where it will be read without any action.[2]

A business cannot grade its own “independent” comparison

Section 465.6 of the rule prohibits a business from misrepresenting, expressly or by implication, that a website, organization, or entity it controls provides independent reviews or opinions.[3] The provision reaches further than a review site — FTC staff gives the example of a company that creates its own award or seal program and then presents the award as if an outside body conferred it.[3] It does not apply to a business’s own hosted consumer reviews, only to a separate claim of independent opinion.[3]

For a contractor, that rules out building a “best roofers in town” page, ranking your own company first, and presenting the list as neutral research. A disclosure cannot cure an express claim of independence; for an implied claim, whether a disclosure is enough depends on the overall impression the page leaves.[3] Name the source and the relationship behind any award or “top contractor” claim, or do not use it.

Responding is allowed; intimidation and groundless threats are not

A business may answer a negative review publicly, and the rule prohibits a public false accusation, made in response to a review with knowledge that it is false or with reckless disregard for the truth, in an attempt to stop a review from being written or to get it removed.[2] It also prohibits using physical threats or intimidation to get a review, or part of one, removed or changed — and FTC staff defines intimidation beyond physical threats to include abusive communications, stalking, character assassination, and sexual harassment used to force or deter someone from acting by inducing fear.[3]

A business may still threaten legitimate legal action if it has a real basis for one. What the rule bars is an “unfounded or groundless legal threat” used either to stop a consumer from leaving a review or to get one removed — defined as a threat resting on legal contentions unwarranted by existing law, or on factual contentions with no evidentiary support.[3] Contacting a customer privately to resolve a reported problem is allowed, as is simply asking a satisfied customer to update an earlier review; neither is suppression under the rule.[3]

Before responding to a negative review, separate three questions: what do your own records establish, which part of the review is a checkable fact versus opinion, and would your response still look reasonable if a future customer read the full exchange?

Review suppression is narrower than it sounds — and the FTC Act fills the rest

The suppression provision has two parts. The threat-and-intimidation rule above applies to any consumer review, on any platform, including Google.[2] The second part applies only to reviews displayed in a portion of a business’s own website or platform dedicated to receiving and displaying reviews: a business may not misrepresent that those reviews represent most or all of the reviews submitted while hiding reviews because of their rating or negative sentiment.[2] Within that second part, reordering reviews — by helpfulness votes, or defaulting to the top rating first — is not suppression under this provision.[3] Refusing a review that is about the wrong business or product, or a stated policy of excluding reviews that only discuss something like delivery or customer service, is also allowed under the rule itself, as long as the policy applies evenly regardless of whether the excluded reviews are positive or negative.[3]

The provision does not reach the selective use of your most positive reviews in marketing materials outside the dedicated review section — but that gap is covered by broader authority, not left open. FTC staff is explicit that organizing a review section so negative reviews are hard to find, or featuring non-representative reviews in advertising, can still be an unfair or deceptive practice under general FTC consumer-protection law even when this specific provision is not triggered.[3] A contractor’s practical rule should track the broader law, not just the narrower provision: do not build a workflow that routes unhappy customers to a private form while sending happy customers to the public review page, and do not advertise a cherry-picked set of reviews as if it represents the whole picture. FTC staff says asking for reviews only from customers you think are happy is not specifically prohibited by the rule, “but this practice could violate the FTC Act.”[3]

A one-page contractor check

Use this before approving a review campaign, a marketing piece that quotes a customer, a reputation vendor, or a response to a negative review. These are our own editorial recommendations, not a reproduction of the rule’s text:

• Every quoted customer and the job described are real and traceable.
• No customer was given finished wording to post as their own account.
• No incentive depends on whether the review turns out positive or negative.
• Any material incentive is disclosed.
• Employees, relatives, owners, and agents are not presented as independent customers in a targeted solicitation.
• Any necessary insider relationship is stated where a reader will actually see it.
• No company-controlled site, badge, award, or entity is presented as independent without naming who actually controls it.
• Negative reviews are answered with facts, not false accusations, intimidation, or a legal threat you cannot support.
• Marketing materials do not present a hand-picked set of reviews as a complete or representative picture.
• The business can point to real records behind any public factual response.

A competitor’s reviews that look suspicious are not proof of a rule violation. The competitor-review analysis guide covers how to turn public review patterns into questions about your own operation rather than an accusation about someone else’s.

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