Why Bought Reviews Vanish, and What to Ask Instead

Every few weeks someone offers to sell you reviews. Fifty five-star reviews for a few thousand rupees, delivered over a fortnight, "100% safe, permanent". It is tempting when you have four reviews and the competitor two lanes away has ninety. It is also the single fastest way to make your Google Business Profile look worse than it did when you started.

This is not a lecture about ethics. It is about mechanics: what those reviews are made of, why they behave the way they do, and what to do instead that takes about ninety seconds per customer.

What a bought review is actually made of

A review is not a floating object. It is attached to a Google account. That account has a history — other reviews, photos, contributions, a location pattern, a device, a login history. When you buy reviews you are renting somebody else's account for thirty seconds, and you have no control over what else that account does for the rest of its life.

The people selling them are running the same accounts across hundreds of businesses. The same account leaves five stars for a dental clinic in Laxmi Nagar on Tuesday, a packers-and-movers firm in Pune on Wednesday, and a coaching centre in Hyderabad on Thursday. None of the reviews mention anything specific, because the person writing them has never been to any of these places. "Very good service, highly recommended, best in the city."

Google's own policies are unambiguous on two points that matter here. Fake engagement is prohibited — content that does not represent a genuine experience. And offering or accepting money, products or services in exchange for reviews is prohibited. Those are published policies, not folklore. India also has a voluntary standard for online consumer reviews, IS 19000:2022 from the Bureau of Indian Standards, which sets out principles for collection and publication. Voluntary means nobody is going to raid your shop. It does mean the direction of travel is one way.

How filtering behaves, as far as anyone can tell

Nobody outside Google knows exactly how review filtering works, and anyone who tells you they do is guessing with confidence. What business owners can observe, repeatedly, is this:

• Reviews disappear in batches, not one by one. A profile gains twenty reviews over three weeks and loses fourteen of them on a single day, months later. That pattern is consistent with the source accounts being actioned together rather than each review being judged on its own.
• The drop often comes long after the purchase. Which is why the seller's "permanent, guaranteed" line survives — you have stopped paying attention by then, and their WhatsApp number has changed.
• Bursts stand out. A shop that has averaged one review a month for two years, then collects fifteen in four days, is a visible anomaly in its own history.
• Nothing about the review text is specific. Genuine reviews mention the thing. The delayed part, the person who called back, the price being what was quoted. Bought ones cannot, because there is nothing to mention.

The worst case is not losing the reviews. It is a profile suspension, where the listing comes off Maps entirely while you appeal, and you discover that a large share of your walk-ins were people who searched for you on a phone. Reinstatement is a form and a wait, not a phone call.

The thing we would not sell you: review gating

There is a softer product that gets sold as the respectable option, and it is worth naming because agencies including ours could sell it and shouldn't. It works like this: an app or a QR card first asks the customer "how was your experience?". Happy faces get sent to the Google review link. Unhappy faces get sent to a private feedback form that goes to your inbox instead.

This is called review gating, and Google's guidance specifically says not to discourage or prohibit negative reviews, and not to selectively solicit positive reviews. Sending only the happy half to Google is exactly that. Beyond the policy question, it hollows out the thing you were trying to build. A profile with nothing but five stars and no texture reads as bought even when it isn't — buyers scroll to the three-star reviews first, because that is where the honest detail lives.

Two more things we would not buy. "Negative review removal" services: you can flag a review for policy violation, and Google either agrees or does not. Nobody has a back channel. And incentives — ₹100 off for a review, a free dessert, entry into a draw. Prohibited, and easy to spot when six reviews in a week all mention the free dessert.

The ask that actually works

Reviews come from asking. Almost nobody volunteers. The reason most businesses have four reviews is not that customers are unhappy — it is that nobody has ever asked them, or the asking was done badly.

What badly looks like: a printed card handed over at billing that says "Give us 5 stars on Google", left for the customer to find your listing themselves. That is three steps of work for a stranger and a demand for a specific rating. It gets ignored.

What works is four things together.

1. The right moment. Ask when the value has just landed, not at the end of the month. The AC is cooling. The delivery arrived intact. The report went out. That is the window, and it is a few hours wide, not a week.
2. The right person. Whoever did the work asks. The technician, the doctor, the account handler. A request from a person the customer just dealt with is answered at a rate an automated blast never matches.
3. One tap. Google Business Profile gives you a short review link from the dashboard — the "Ask for reviews" option produces a URL that opens the review box directly. Send it on WhatsApp. Not the website, not Maps, not a search. The box, open, cursor blinking.
4. Ask for a specific thing, not a star count. "If you have a minute, could you write what you came in for and whether it got sorted? It genuinely helps people who are deciding." You are asking for a sentence about a fact, which people can do, rather than a compliment, which makes them squirm.

Ask everyone. Not the ones you think will be kind. The mix is what makes it credible, and a four-point-six average with seventy reviews outperforms a five-point-zero with eleven in every way that matters to a buyer reading on a phone.

Volume and pace

Two or three a week, forever, beats thirty in a fortnight and then silence. Build the ask into the job sheet or the closing message so it happens without anyone remembering to do it. If your customer follow-up already runs through a system, this is a natural place to put it — see business process automation for how the reminder fires on its own, and CRM systems if you want the request tied to a completed job rather than a calendar date.

What to do when a bad one lands

It will. Reply within a day, in public, without arguing. Name the specific issue, say what you are doing about it, give a phone number or an email and stop. You are not writing to the reviewer, who has moved on. You are writing to the next forty people who read that thread while deciding whether to call you.

Do not reply with a paragraph about how this customer was rude. Do not reply with a marketing sentence about your commitment to excellence. A short, factual, slightly boring reply is the most persuasive thing on a review page.

Why this matters more for AI answers

This part is genuinely uncertain and should be treated as such. Search results increasingly include generated summaries, and assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini get asked "who is a good CA in Preet Vihar" directly. Those systems are working from text — review text among it. What is observable is that specific language gives a summariser something to say. "Fixed my inverter the same evening, quoted ₹2,400, charged ₹2,400" contains facts. "Best service" contains none.

What nobody can tell you honestly is how much weight any given system gives reviews, or whether that changes next quarter. So the sensible position is that detailed, genuine reviews are useful for humans reading them today and plausibly useful for machines summarising them tomorrow, and generic ones are useful to nobody. If you want to think about the machine side deliberately, our notes on AI visibility and generative search cover what can and cannot be influenced.

Start this week

Open your Google Business Profile, copy the short review link, and save it as a WhatsApp reply template on the phone your customers already message. Brief the two or three people who actually finish jobs on when to send it and what to say. Reply to every review you already have, including the good ones, including the old ones. That is the whole programme, and it costs nothing.

If your listing is thin in other ways too, or you are not sure the profile is set up to be found in the first place, our local SEO work starts with the profile before it touches anything else. Or just tell us what you are seeing and we will tell you whether it is worth paying anyone to fix.

Questions we get asked