In this video, the speaker warns business owners about a common scam used by some marketing agencies: review gating. Review gating is the illegal practice of filtering customer reviews so that only 5‑star feedback is posted to a Google listing, which can lead to severe penalties, including removal of the business’s online presence. The speaker explains why this practice violates Google’s policies and can result in a shutdown of the business’s listing. He then contrasts this with an ethical, trust‑based automated review system that sends genuine review requests immediately after a job is completed, highlighting the importance of authentic feedback for local service businesses. The video also promotes a program that teaches businesses how to implement this legitimate system, offering a recurring income opportunity for consultants, and includes a call‑to‑action for viewers to comment “AI” or message him for more information, while warning scammers to stay away.
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Business owners, beware of this scam. So you have marketing agencies right now charging you to do review activations or review reactivations or automating these reviews. Now that's not the scam. The scam is what they're doing to generate these reviews and what reviews they're posting. Let me explain. So there's a thing called review gating, which is absolutely illegal to do. So what review gating is, is when someone wants to leave you a review, and then you on the backend filter out the reviews to only post a 5-star review. Now if you are in a business that's a local service-based business, this is a very common service that you've probably been pitched before. Now on the surface it sounds super sexy, it sounds amazing because all you're going to get on your Google listing is 5-star reviews. The problem is that it's actually illegal to do, and if the wrong person finds your listing and sees Google sees that you're doing this, you can be completely shut down and actually get banned. If Google finds out that you're doing this, Google will shut down your listing and your business will be completely taken off online. So the right way to do this is to actually do good service and automating the review and receiving the actual review that you deserve. So if the business gets a 1, 2, or 3-star review, the business needs to go out and reach out to the customer and actually figure out what they can fix to actually improve that review to go to a 4 or 5-star review. Now I know that doesn't sound as sexy as just sending the 5-star reviews to Google, but if you want to run a real legitimate business that doesn't get banned or taken down after many, many years of doing business, then you want to be able to go to sleep at night and do it the right way. This is why we help business owners do things the right and ethical way. We automate reviews using a trust-based system that sends out a review request immediately after a job has been completed. Not just is it a review request, but it's a trust-based review request that puts their team front and center, whoever just completed the job, and thanks the individual customer for allowing us to do the service. Now in the review request, we mention why we're sending a review request, and we basically say that that it allows other people around to help find us so that we can help them as well. Now this is a great service to offer because you have many businesses that have been in business for 10+ years and have very, very little reviews. Either because they don't know how to collect them, they don't know how to ask for them, or they find it too difficult to basically ask for the reviews. And as we all know how reviews are very important to us as anytime we're looking for a new business to go to that we've never been to, we're studying those reviews to make sure we're not going to waste our time, effort, or money going to a business that's going to offer us a terrible service. This is one of the things that we teach inside of our program is how to do this the right way for businesses so that you can generate a recurring income helping businesses do this the right way. Keyword: the right way. Stop scamming businesses. If you want to learn more about how to do this, comment "AI" down below and shoot me a message. We'll have a conversation to discuss what our program involves and how you can get started doing the same thing. But if you're trying to run a scam, unfollow me, keep scrolling, and don't reach out to me if you're trying to run review gating systems for businesses.
