Review management, and how reputation gets measured
Review management is the work of earning reviews honestly, responding to them well, and reporting the ones that break a platform's published rules. It is the part of reputation management most businesses touch first, and the part with the clearest rules, because platforms publish what they will remove and federal trade rules now cover fake reviews and incentivised testimonials directly. This section covers that policy layer, the craft of responding to criticism in public, and the separate question of measurement: net promoter score, sentiment analysis, share of voice, and whether an online reputation score is a real thing.
The rule that governs everything else is that a review is the reviewer's speech, not yours, and no platform removes one because the subject dislikes it. What platforms do remove is content that breaks a published policy: a review from someone who was never a customer, a review about a different location, a review that is really a complaint about a third party, spam, conflicts of interest, harassment, and off-topic content. Reporting a review is free and takes minutes. Reporting one that violates nothing wastes your time and the credibility of your next report.
Responding is the underrated half. A public reply is not written for the reviewer, who has usually made up their mind. It is written for the next person reading, who is deciding whether the complaint sounds like a pattern or an incident, and whether this is a business that fixes things. That reader is looking for specifics, an absence of defensiveness, and an offer to continue the conversation somewhere else. One measured reply under a harsh review does more work than a dozen five-star ratings underneath it.
Getting more reviews is legitimate, and the boundaries are published rather than folklore. Asking every customer is allowed. Asking only the happy ones, or filtering by predicted sentiment before showing the review link, is review gating, and platform policy and federal trade rules both treat it as a problem. Paying for reviews, writing them yourself, or having staff write them is not a grey area at all. The pages here set out what is permitted, what is not, and what the enforcement risk actually looks like.
Measurement is the other half of this section, and it deserves scepticism. Net promoter score measures willingness to recommend, not reputation. Sentiment analysis assigns polarity to text and is unreliable on sarcasm, industry jargon, and very short reviews. Share of voice measures how much of a conversation you occupy, not what the conversation says. None of these are worthless, and none of them is the single number people wish existed. There is no universal online reputation score, and a vendor selling one is selling their own arithmetic. The most honest starting measurement is still what a search for your business actually returns, which is what an audit reads.
Reviews and reputation metrics, page by page
How to Respond to a Negative Review
Writing for the next reader rather than the reviewer, with the structure that holds up in public.
How to Get More Google Reviews, Legitimately
Asking every customer, within the rules, and the shortcuts that put a listing at risk.
How to Report a Fake Google Review
The reporting route, the evidence that helps, and what to do when the first report fails.
Google Review Policy Violations, Listed
Every category Google publishes as removable, with what each one actually covers.
Does Google Delete Reviews?
What Google removes on its own, what it removes on report, and what it leaves alone.
What Is Review Gating?
Filtering who gets asked for a public review, why platforms prohibit it, and the legal exposure.
Net Promoter Score, Explained
What the question measures, how the score is calculated, and what it does not tell you.
Sentiment Analysis for Reputation
How software assigns polarity to text, where it fails, and how much weight the output deserves.
What Is Brand Sentiment?
The difference between how much people talk about you and how they feel about it.
What Is Share of Voice?
Measuring how much of a category conversation you occupy, and why volume is not approval.
Is There an Online Reputation Score?
Whether a universal score exists, and what the products selling one are actually measuring.
Reputation Monitoring: What to Track
What to watch, how often, and which alerts are worth acting on rather than merely reading.
How to Measure Reputation
Choosing measures that answer a real question, and setting a baseline you can compare against.
Questions about reviews and reputation metrics
How do I check my online reputation?
Search your business name signed out, read the first two pages of results, open every review profile you hold, and note the rating, the recency, and what the most recent critical reviews say.
Does Google delete reviews?
Yes, when a review breaks its published policies or is caught by its spam systems. It does not delete a review because the business disputes the experience described in it.
How do you measure reputation?
By picking measures that answer a real question and holding them steady: what a name search returns, review rating and volume over time, and sentiment or share of voice where the volume supports them.
Is it against the rules to ask customers for reviews?
No. Asking is allowed on the major platforms. Asking selectively based on how happy a customer seems, or offering anything in exchange for a positive review, is where the rules are broken.
Is there an online reputation score?
Not a universal one. Products that sell a score are calculating their own, from inputs they choose, and the number is only meaningful inside that product.