Review request generator

1. Fill in your business name, your first name, and the customer's first name.
2. Describe the job the way they would — 'the boiler service on Tuesday', not 'your recent service'.
3. Paste your review link. In Google Business Profile it is under Ask for reviews; use the short link.
4. Choose when you are asking. The moment changes the message materially.
5. Pick a tone, then copy whichever channel you are using.
6. Read the note about your chosen moment — it explains why that timing converts the way it does.

The highest-converting sequence is ask out loud, then send the link immediately. The spoken ask is not optional decoration; it is the part that does most of the work.

• As you finish, face to face. The best moment and the one almost nobody uses. The customer is looking at the finished work and their goodwill is at its peak. Ask out loud, then send the link before you leave the driveway.
• The next morning. The best compromise. They have lived with the work overnight and nothing has gone wrong, and you are not interrupting the job itself.
• About a week later. Works, and noticeably less well. The feeling has faded and your name is no longer top of mind, which is exactly why the generated version names the job explicitly.
• A repeat customer. Underused. Someone on their third visit is far more likely to write something, and their review carries more weight because it describes a relationship rather than a transaction.

The general principle: ask while the customer still feels the benefit. Every day that passes costs you conversion, and after about two weeks a cold request from someone whose name they half-remember converts close to nothing.

Incentivising is the first: offering a discount, a prize draw entry, a free anything in exchange for a review. It is against Google's policies, it is detectable, and the sanction is removal of reviews or suspension of the profile — which destroys the asset you were trying to build.

Gating is the second and it is less obviously wrong, which is why so many businesses do it. Gating means asking the customer how satisfied they are first, and only showing the review link to the ones who answer positively. Several commercial review platforms have been built around exactly this. It is against the policies too.

The honest version of what gating is trying to achieve is a single line in your message: if anything is not right, please tell me first rather than the internet, because I would rather come back and fix it. That gives a dissatisfied customer a better option without hiding the link from them, and it is in every message this tool generates.

Worth adding: the fear driving gating is largely misplaced. A profile with only five-star reviews reads as suspicious. A calm, specific reply to a one-star review persuades more prospective customers than the five-star reviews do, because it is the only place a reader can see how you behave when something goes wrong.

Most review-request advice is about message wording, which is the least important variable. The largest single factor is whether a human being asked out loud before the link arrived.

The reason is social rather than technical. A text from a business is a request from an organisation and is easy to ignore. A text following a conversation is a promise you made to a person you just met, and people keep those.

It also takes ten seconds and costs nothing, which is why it is in the generated output alongside the written messages. The wording matters less than doing it: some version of "if you're happy with how it's turned out, I'll send you a link for a review — it takes a minute and it makes a real difference to a small outfit" is enough.

The one thing to avoid is apologising for asking. Hedged requests convert worse and, oddly, feel more imposing to the customer than a straightforward one.

Roughly one review per five to ten asks is normal for home services, and that is with a good process. Retail and anything transactional does worse. Anything embarrassing does worst of all, for obvious reasons.

This matters because owners send twenty requests, get two reviews, and conclude the wording is wrong. It usually is not. The compounding comes from asking every single time, not from a better template — twenty asks a month at a ten percent rate is twenty-four reviews a year, which transforms a profile.

Recency matters as much as volume. Eight reviews from this year outperform thirty from four years ago on the thing that actually persuades a reader, which is whether you are still doing good work now. That makes review collection a habit rather than a campaign — a burst of forty and then nothing ages badly.

One follow-up is worth sending and improves the rate. A second does not, and it changes how you are perceived by exactly the customers you most want to keep.

Use the short review link from your Google Business Profile, under Ask for reviews. Not the map URL, not a link to your profile page — the direct link that opens the review box. The difference between those is several taps, and several taps is a large fraction of your response rate.

Send by text rather than email where you have the number. Texts get opened within minutes; emails to someone who is not expecting them frequently do not get opened at all.

Say how long it takes and mean it. "Takes about a minute" is true of the direct link and sets an expectation the customer can agree to.

And do not ask for anything specific. Suggesting what to write reads as scripted, and a review that reads as scripted persuades nobody. Two honest sentences in the customer's own words are worth more than a paragraph you supplied.