Will you contact the person who left the review?

No. Nobody at TrustReviews contacts the person who left a review, by message, call, public reply or any other route. We also never ask Google or any other platform who a reviewer is. We screenshot each review before work starts, and our filing team reports it to the platform under that platform’s own policy. The platform judges the content against its rules, so we do not need to know who wrote it.

Platform rules are one reason we stay away from reviewers. Google’s Rating manipulation rule bans “coercing or pressuring customers for specific ratings or reviews”. Its Incentivized or Biased Reviews rule covers any review influenced by “a payment, discount, free goods or services, or any other benefit offered to the reviewer”. Trustpilot’s Guidelines for Businesses tell businesses not to “pressure, blackmail, or threaten reviewers to write, edit, or delete a review”, and ban refunds and discounts offered in connection with writing or editing one.

The law is the other reason. Under the FTC Consumer Review Rule, 16 CFR 465.7 makes it a violation for anyone to use a groundless legal threat, a physical threat, intimidation or a knowingly false public accusation to get a review removed. “Anyone” includes a company working for you. The FTC’s questions and answers on the rule say intimidation can include abusive communications and stalking. They also say that paying consumers to change or remove truthful negative reviews may violate the FTC Act. Is review removal legal explains what the rule allows.

You can still talk to your own customer. The same FTC answers say the rule does not stop a business from contacting customers who post negative reviews to resolve the problem they reported. If you do, fix the problem and leave the review to the customer. Do not make a refund or discount depend on a changed review, and keep any public reply calm (how to respond to negative reviews).

Some platforms contact the reviewer themselves. Trustpilot can ask a reviewer for documentation and give them three days to act. Google says a reviewer may be told when their review is removed (does Google tell the reviewer). That contact comes from the platform, not from us. If someone offers to get reviews taken down by contacting the reviewers, or contacts you and asks for payment to remove reviews, read review removal scams first.