Somewhere right now, an e-commerce founder is setting up a clever little flow: after delivery, customers get asked "how was your order?" with a row of stars. Four or five stars? Straight to Trustpilot. Three or fewer? A private feedback form, and the review request never comes. It feels smart. It feels harmless. In the UK, since the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act came into force for reviews in April 2025, it is the kind of practice that can cost a business up to 10% of global turnover.
This guide explains what review gating is, what the law actually changed, what the platforms were already banning, and what the compliant version of "more good reviews" looks like. The usual caveat applies: this is practical guidance, not legal advice.
What counts as review gating
Review gating is any mechanism that filters customers by sentiment before inviting them to review publicly. The classic patterns:
- The star-filter funnel described above, where only high scorers reach the public review page.
- Selective invitations: exporting your happiest-looking customers (repeat buyers, no support tickets) and inviting only them.
- Suppression: burying or delaying invitations to anyone who contacted support.
The common thread: the public picture is manipulated, not by writing fake reviews, but by controlling who gets to speak. Consumers reading the profile believe they are seeing the honest distribution of experiences. They are not.
What the DMCC Act changed
The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 rewrote UK consumer protection enforcement, and reviews got their own provisions, in force since 6 April 2025. Three things matter for a store:
1. Fake and misleading review practices are banned outright
The banned practices list now explicitly covers submitting or commissioning fake reviews, offering fake review services, and publishing consumer reviews in a misleading way. Concealing the negative side of your review picture, which is what gating does, sits squarely in that territory: the CMA's guidance treats suppressing or hiding genuine negative reviews as a misleading practice.
2. Businesses must take reasonable and proportionate steps
If you publish reviews (on your site, for instance), you are expected to take reasonable steps to ensure they are genuine and not presented in a misleading way. "We use an app and never looked into it" is not a defence.
3. The CMA can now fine directly
This is the enforcement revolution. Before, the Competition and Markets Authority had to go through the courts. Now it can decide breaches itself and impose fines of up to 10% of global turnover. The CMA has said it expects businesses to have had time to comply, and reviews are one of its stated priority areas.
The platforms banned it first
Even before the law, gating violated the rules everywhere that matters:
- Google has prohibited "discouraging or prohibiting negative reviews, or selectively soliciting positive reviews" since 2018. Detected patterns can get reviews removed en masse.
- Trustpilot requires invitations to go to all comparable customers without cherry-picking, and takes action against profiles that filter.
So the practical risk was never theoretical: stores lose their collected reviews, get warning banners, or get invitation rights restricted. The DMCC Act added a regulator with a calculator to the picture.
"But asking unhappy customers for reviews is suicide"
This is the objection every founder raises, and it deserves a straight answer. The fear assumes your unhappy customer was going to stay unhappy. The compliant play is different, and it works better:
- Everyone gets the same honest question a few days after delivery: how did it go? Not a review link with stars attached. A question, from a person.
- Unhappy answers become support cases, immediately, with a human response and a real fix. Nothing about this is gating: you are doing customer service, which is not only legal but the entire point.
- Once the problem is genuinely resolved, the invitation to review goes out anyway. That is the difference between recovery and gating: the customer is invited regardless of the outcome, and what they write is up to them.
Here is what surprises everyone the first time they run this honestly: a customer whose problem was fixed properly writes a better review than a customer who never had a problem. "They messed up my order and then absolutely took care of me" is the most persuasive sentence in commerce, because every reader knows things go wrong sometimes and wants to know what happens when they do. Gating does not just break rules. It throws away your best material. We wrote about how to handle the public side of angry customers in our reply templates guide, and the compliant collection mechanics in the Trustpilot guide.
A quick self-check
- Does every customer with a comparable experience get a review invitation? If a support ticket removes someone from the flow, that is gating.
- Does any screen in your post-purchase flow route people differently based on a rating they gave you privately? That is the textbook pattern.
- Do your on-site reviews show the real distribution, including the negatives, with your replies? Curating them into a highlight reel is presentation risk under the same rules.
- Could you explain your review collection to a CMA officer in two sentences without feeling clever? The honest system fits in two sentences.
If you failed any of these, the fix is not cosmetic, it is structural: a collection system where honesty is the input and recovery does the heavy lifting. Building exactly that, without the store lifting a finger, is our whole job. If you want to know how your current setup scores, start with the free audit.
FAQ
Is review gating actually illegal in the UK now?
Publishing reviews in a misleading way is a banned practice under the DMCC Act, in force since April 2025, and the CMA's guidance covers suppressing genuine negative reviews. Gating flows sit in exactly that territory, on top of violating Google's and Trustpilot's rules.
Can I still fix a customer's problem before they review?
Yes, and you should. Resolving problems is customer service. Gating only begins when the review invitation depends on the sentiment. Resolve first, invite regardless.
What about "internal feedback" surveys?
Private satisfaction surveys are fine on their own. They become a gating mechanism the moment their result decides who receives a public review invitation.
Does this apply outside the UK?
The DMCC Act is UK law, but the EU's consumer protection rules also prohibit misleading review practices, and the platform policies apply globally. The compliant system described here is the safe design everywhere.