How to Use Google Reviews as Testimonials in Your Marketing (Legally)

Your Google reviews are already doing marketing work — recycle them

A five-star Google review sitting on your profile is doing real work: it's often the first thing a searcher reads before they ever land on your website. It's easy to forget that same review can do a second job — as a testimonial on your website, in a social post, or in an ad — without you writing a single new word of copy.

Third-party reviews consistently carry more weight than your own marketing copy, for a simple reason: a stranger vouching for you is more persuasive than you vouching for yourself. If a review is already public on your Google profile, reusing it elsewhere isn't inventing new content — it's putting content that already exists to better use.

What's generally fine to reuse

A review posted publicly on your Google Business Profile is, by definition, already visible to anyone who looks. Quoting it elsewhere — on your website, in a printed brochure, in a social post — is standard practice. What matters is how you handle it once you do.

• Quote the review exactly as written — don't paraphrase, trim mid-sentence in a way that changes the meaning, or combine two different reviews into one quote.
• Keep the star rating attached if you show one, so the quote is read in its original context.
• Attribute it honestly — a first name, a suburb, or "Verified Google review" is enough; don't invent a surname or detail the reviewer never gave.
• Link back to your Google profile where practical, so a sceptical reader can verify it for themselves.

Where it becomes misleading — and a genuine ACL risk

Australian Consumer Law prohibits misleading or deceptive conduct, and that applies to how you present customer reviews just as much as any other marketing claim.

• Don't cherry-pick so aggressively that the overall impression is materially different from reality — showcasing your one five-star review while sitting at a 3.2 average paints a misleading picture.
• Don't edit a review's substance — turning "good, but the wait was long" into just "good" changes what the customer actually said.
• Don't present a review as an ordinary, unprompted opinion if it was left in exchange for an incentive — offering rewards for reviews already breaches Google's policies, and presenting the result as organic compounds the problem.
• Don't fabricate a testimonial or attribute a real sentiment to a fictional customer. This is one of the more common ACL enforcement areas in small business marketing.

Practical ways to feature them

You don't need special software to put genuine reviews to work.

• A dedicated "What customers say" section on your homepage or pricing page, with three or four full quotes and first names.
• A rotating set of short quotes pulled from your most recent reviews, refreshed periodically so it doesn't look static.
• A screenshot of the review as it appears on Google — it reads as more credible than retyped text because it's visibly verifiable.
• Review or aggregate-rating schema markup on your site, so eligible pages can show a star rating in search results — this only works with genuine, current review data, never invented numbers.

A quick note on permission

There's no general legal requirement to ask permission before quoting a review that's already public — but for a testimonial that features someone's full name or photo prominently, asking first is simply good practice. It costs nothing, most customers are glad to be asked, and it avoids the rare case where someone who left a quick review would rather not be quoted at length on your homepage.