Review Gating
Review gating is the practice of pre-screening customers and routing only the satisfied ones to post a public review while steering unhappy ones to a private feedback channel, so the published ratings look better than the full customer experience actually was.
A typical gate asks how a customer feels first: pick a high rating and you are sent to Google or the product page, pick a low one and you land on a private support form. The intent is obvious, which is the problem. It manufactures a rating that does not represent the real distribution of opinion, and shoppers, regulators, and search engines increasingly treat that as deception rather than reputation management.
This is not a grey area. The FTC has stated that selectively suppressing negative reviews is deceptive, and Google, Trustpilot, and most app marketplaces prohibit gating outright; enforcement ranges from removed reviews to delisting. The honest alternative is to ask every buyer for a review without filtering, and to handle complaints through a clearly separate support path that does not decide who gets to speak publicly.
The deeper point is that you do not need to hide negatives to look credible. A mix of ratings reads as real, and a thoughtful reply to a critical review often persuades more than a wall of five stars. Getting the genuine reviews you already have read, corroborated, and surfaced by search and AI is the work that pays off, and the gap BetterReviews is built to close.