Staff Incentives for Google Reviews: What's Allowed and What Isn't

Two very different things people mean by "incentivising reviews"

Google's rules and the Australian Consumer Law are clear about incentivising customers: offering a discount, freebie, or prize draw in exchange for a review is prohibited, full stop, regardless of how the review turns out. That's a settled question, covered in our guide to review gating.

This guide is about a different, less-discussed question: rewarding your own staff for their effort in asking for reviews. That's legal and can genuinely work — but the way you design it determines whether it stays that way.

Why rewarding the ask is fine, but rewarding the outcome isn't

Rewarding staff for things fully within their control — how many customers they asked, how many QR codes they handed out, how many follow-up messages they sent — is straightforward. None of it touches what a customer actually writes.

Rewarding staff based on the outcome — a bonus per five-star review, a leaderboard for "most five-star reviews this month" — creates a different incentive entirely. A staff member chasing that bonus has a reason to quietly stop asking customers who seem unhappy, or to wait until a complaint has been smoothed over before asking at all. That's review gating in every practical sense, just carried out by an employee protecting their own commission rather than by a deliberate company policy. Google's systems, and a regulator looking at the pattern, don't distinguish between the two.

What a compliant incentive programme looks like

• Track and reward asks made, QR codes issued, or follow-up messages sent — behaviour, not results.
• Make it explicit in training, not just in a policy document, that every customer gets asked — not just the ones a staff member expects to rate the business well.
• If you want to celebrate reviews publicly — a shout-out, an employee of the month mention — base it on the volume and consistency of asking, not the star rating attached to what came back.
• Spot-check the pattern occasionally: if one staff member's review requests land a suspiciously perfect run of five stars against a colleague's more mixed results, it's worth a quiet conversation about whether they're pre-screening who gets asked.
• Never let a bonus reward or penalise a staff member over a single review someone else chose to write — the content of that review was never in their control, and tying pay to it pushes toward exactly the behaviour you're trying to avoid.

A simple structure that avoids the trap

A points-based approach works well in practice: one point for every genuine review request logged, regardless of what happens after, with a small team reward at a set threshold and no dollar value ever attached to a specific review's rating. Automating the logging — a tool that records when a follow-up message actually went out — removes the temptation to fudge the count, though the decision about who gets asked in the first place still comes down to how staff behave at the counter.

What to say if a customer offers the trade themselves

Occasionally a customer volunteers the exchange rather than staff proposing it — "I'll leave you a great review if you throw in a discount." The rule doesn't change based on who suggested it: staff should politely decline, and simply ask for, or thank the customer for, a genuine review with no conditions attached either way. Train the team to expect this and have a comfortable line ready, so it doesn't feel awkward to say no in the moment.