Key facts
- Google's guidelines prohibit review gating, sending review requests only to customers you expect to be happy while routing unhappy ones to a private form, and any vendor caught doing this can get the whole Google Business Profile suspended, not just one review removed.
- The FTC's 2024 rule on fake and deceptive reviews covers any US business that pays for, edits, or hides reviews, and provincial consumer protection law in Canada treats manipulated reviews as misleading advertising with its own penalties.
- A review request sent within 24 to 48 hours of the appointment or job, while the experience is still fresh, converts to a posted review at a far higher rate than one bundled into a monthly newsletter days or weeks later.
- Multi-location businesses need requests tagged to the specific location and, ideally, the staff member who did the work, or the results are useless for isolating a location or technician that is actually the problem.
- Review software is billed monthly, usually per location or per seat, on top of whatever a business pays SearchPod or anyone else for the marketing that puts customers in front of the vendor in the first place.
What the program covers, and what it does not
Write the scope so a vendor cannot quietly narrow it after they win the work. In scope: automated review requests triggered after a completed job or appointment, a written response to every review within an agreed number of business days, monitoring across the platforms your customers actually check, and a negative review escalation step that routes an angry customer to a human before they post, not instead of letting them post.
Out of scope, stated plainly so nobody assumes otherwise: fixing the service failures that cause bad reviews in the first place, buying reviews, incentivizing reviews with discounts or gifts, review gating in any form, and managing a listing on a platform your business is not already on unless you asked for that separately.
Name the platforms in the contract rather than leaving it to "all major review sites", which invites a vendor to do the minimum on the two platforms that matter and call the rest covered.
What the vendor must be given
A review program cannot run on assumptions, so the RFP should list exactly what access the vendor needs and at what level. Manager-level access to your Google Business Profile, never primary ownership transferred to the vendor's account. A feed or export from the CRM or point-of-sale system that tells the vendor who was served and when, so requests go out to real customers on a real schedule.
A short brand voice guide so responses sound like your business and not like a call centre. A named escalation contact on your side who the vendor can reach the same day a customer threatens a public complaint, and a list of anything you never want offered as an apology, such as a refund promise the vendor is not authorized to make on your behalf.
Ownership and exit clauses
State in writing that your Google Business Profile listing, your customer contact list, and every review response the vendor wrote on your behalf belong to you, not to the vendor, both during the contract and after it ends. The vendor administers the listing; it does not own it.
Require full credential handover, including any review widget embedded on your website and any third-party monitoring dashboard login, within a set number of days of cancellation. If the vendor's tool holds your review history, require an export in a plain format, not a screenshot or a PDF you cannot search.
A vendor that resists naming an exit process, or that wants its own email address as the recovery contact on your Google account, is telling you something about how hard leaving will be.
Milestones and acceptance tests
Set dates the vendor has to hit, not just a description of the service. Integration with your CRM or booking system live within two weeks of signing. The first automated review request sent within 30 days. A response-time service level, for example every review answered within two business days, tracked and reported, not just promised.
Acceptance test: after 60 days, can the vendor produce a report you can read without their help, showing requests sent, review count, average rating trend, and response time, with no invented "reputation score" that cannot be traced back to a real number. If they cannot show a sample of that report before you sign, do not assume they will produce it after.
How to score competing proposals
Score every bidder against the same weighted criteria so the proposal that reads the best does not quietly beat the one that actually protects your listing.
Compliance approach to review gating and incentivized reviews, 25 percent.
Integration with your existing CRM or point-of-sale system, 20 percent.
Response-time service level and the escalation process for angry customers, 20 percent.
Price, contract length, and cancellation terms, 20 percent.
Clarity of the monthly report and how it is delivered, 15 percent.
Write the weights into the RFP itself before you send it, so every bidder is scored against a rule they could see in advance.
Questions to make every bidder answer
Put these in writing and require a written answer from each bidder, not a verbal assurance on a sales call.
How exactly do you prevent review gating, and what does your request flow look like for an unhappy customer?
What happens to my Google Business Profile access, my contact list, and my review history if I cancel with 30 days notice?
Can you show a sample monthly report from an existing client, with names removed?
How do you handle a review that names a specific employee by name?
What is your process when a customer says they will remove or change a bad review in exchange for a refund or discount?
Does price change per location if I add a second or third location during the contract?
Related questions
No legitimate vendor guarantees star ratings, because they do not control what a customer writes. What they can reasonably promise is a consistent volume of review requests, a fast response to every review that comes in, and a process that does not put your Google Business Profile at risk. Treat a guaranteed rating as a warning sign, not a selling point.
Google's own guidelines prohibit this practice, called review gating, regardless of whether it is technically legal where you operate. A profile caught doing it can be suspended. In the US, the FTC's rule against manipulated reviews adds a separate layer of risk. Ask every customer the same way and let the review land where it lands.
The reviews themselves stay attached to your Google Business Profile and your other listings, not to the vendor, so switching does not erase what customers have already posted. What you lose is momentum and reporting history if the new vendor cannot see the old data, which is why the ownership and export clauses in this pack matter.
Most platforms only remove a review that breaks their content policy, such as spam, a conflict of interest, or off-topic content, not simply because it is negative. A vendor who promises to get any bad review taken down is either overstating what is possible or planning to do something that risks your listing.
A program can scale across many locations, but each one needs its own request trigger, its own tracked response time, and usually its own line item on the invoice, since most review software bills per location or per seat. Ask for a per-location breakdown before you sign, not a single blended number.
SearchPod is a vendor for this kind of work and would answer this RFP; the acceptance tests here are the ones we agree to.
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