How to Get Google Reviews, Legally, in Canada

Local SEO · Published September 17, 2026

Reviews are the part of local search a business controls most directly and neglects most consistently. They are also the part where the shortcuts carry real legal risk in Canada, because incentivised and filtered reviews are deceptive marketing practices under the Competition Act, not merely a platform policy matter. This is how to ask in a way that works and stays well inside the line.

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Why reviews carry so much weight

Prominence is one of the three factors deciding the map pack, and reviews are the most accessible lever inside it. They also do a second job that ranking discussion tends to miss: they are read. A listing with four reviews and a listing with sixty both appear, and the one with sixty gets the call.

What matters is not only the count. Recency signals the business is still operating. Distribution across time signals a real customer base rather than a burst of solicitation. Text signals more than a bare star rating, because the words customers use become part of what the listing is understood to be about. And responses signal that someone is home.

What you may not do in Canada

This is stricter than most business owners assume, and the exposure is not merely losing a listing. The Competition Bureau has been explicit that fake and misleading reviews are a deceptive marketing practice, and amendments in 2022 and 2024 raised the penalties and widened the reach. Treat the following as hard lines.

• Do not offer anything of value for a review. Not a discount, not a draw entry, not a free coffee, not a charitable donation. Google prohibits it outright, and an incentive that is not disclosed makes the resulting review misleading under Canadian law.
• Do not write reviews for your own business, and do not ask staff, family or friends who were not customers to write them. This is the clearest form of the prohibited conduct.
• Do not buy reviews, from anyone, in any volume, however the service describes itself.
• Do not gate. Asking "how did we do" and routing only the positive answers to Google is prohibited by Google's policies, and presenting a filtered set of reviews as if it were the whole is exactly the misrepresentation the Act is aimed at.
• Do not post reviews of competitors, favourable or otherwise.
• Do not pressure a customer to remove a negative review as a condition of resolving their complaint. Resolve the complaint; the review is theirs.

What you may do, and should

The permitted space is wide and most businesses barely use it. You may ask every customer, every time, as long as you ask everyone rather than a filtered subset and you attach nothing to it.

• Ask everyone, not only the customers you expect to be happy. This is the crucial distinction: asking universally is fine, and selecting for outcome is not.
• Ask immediately. Satisfaction decays fast, and so does the likelihood of anyone doing you a favour. The end of the job, while you are still standing there, is worth more than an email three days later.
• Ask in person first, then send the link. The verbal ask is what secures the commitment; the link removes the friction.
• Use the short review link from your profile, and make it a tap rather than a search. Every step you remove raises the completion rate materially.
• Ask the person who was actually served, by name, referencing the specific job. A generic blast performs poorly and reads as one.
• Make it routine rather than a campaign. A steady trickle built into how jobs close beats a quarterly push, both for the algorithm and because the push never happens twice.
• Respond to every review. Thank the positive ones briefly and specifically. Answer the negative ones factually, without arguing, and take the detail to a private channel.

The ask that actually gets answered

Most review requests fail because they ask for a favour with no specificity and no urgency. A request that names the job, explains why it matters and takes one tap converts several times better.

The structure that works: thank them for the specific thing, say plainly that reviews are how small local businesses get found, ask directly, and give the link. Do not apologise for asking, do not offer anything, and do not ask twice in the same message.

One follow-up, several days later, is reasonable and roughly doubles the response rate. A third is harassment and gets you nothing.

Handling a negative review

A bad review is not the disaster it feels like. A profile of nothing but five-star reviews reads as suspicious to customers, and research on review behaviour consistently finds that a small number of critical reviews increases trust in the rest. What does damage is the response.

Reply within a day. Acknowledge the specific problem rather than issuing a general statement of commitment to excellence. Say what you have done about it. Offer to continue privately, with a name and a number. Do not relitigate the facts in public, even when you are right, because every reader is judging how you handle complaints rather than adjudicating the dispute.

Reviews that violate the platform's policies, containing abuse, clear falsehoods about a transaction that never happened, or a conflict of interest, can be reported. It works sometimes, slowly. It is not a strategy.

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• The Google Business Profile checklist
• How to rank in the Google map pack in Ottawa
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• Our local SEO service
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