What Is Review Gating? Why UK Dental Practices Must Avoid It

Review gating means filtering patients by sentiment before asking for a public review. Google prohibits it outright. Reviews collected this way can be removed, including genuine ones. UK law does not name gating as a banned practice, but it can make a published rating misleading, which is regulated. Practices that display reviews on their own website carry extra duties under the DMCC Act 2024. Collecting private feedback is not gating. Using that feedback to decide who gets asked is.

Review gating is the practice of filtering patients by how satisfied they are before asking them for a public review. A UK dental practice gating its reviews typically asks how the visit went, then sends happy patients to Google while directing unhappy ones to a private form. The result is a public rating that reflects only part of the patient experience.

Google prohibits review gating under its review policies. In the UK it also carries legal risk, though not in the way most articles on this subject claim. The actual position is set out below.

Review gating is rarely deliberate deception. Most practices that gate believe they are being sensible: catch problems privately, and let satisfied patients speak publicly. The intention is reasonable. The mechanism is not, because it produces a rating that misrepresents the practice to prospective patients relying on it.

What review gating looks like in a dental practice

The classic version runs like this. A patient finishes an appointment. Later that day they receive a message asking "How was your visit today?" with two buttons, or a one to five star selector. Patients who answer positively land on a page with a Google review link. Patients who answer negatively land on a private feedback form that goes only to the practice manager.

Every individual review produced by that system may be completely genuine, which is what makes gating so hard to spot from the inside. Nobody wrote a fake review. Nobody was paid. The problem is not the reviews themselves. It is the filter sitting in front of them.

Why does Google prohibit review gating?

Google prohibits discouraging or prohibiting negative reviews, and selectively soliciting positive reviews from customers, under its Maps user-generated content policy. Review gating does both. Google classifies it under fake engagement, alongside paid reviews and reviews written by staff or family members.

The practical consequences matter more than the wording. If Google identifies a gated review flow, it may remove the reviews collected through it. Enforcement is not surgical, and there are widely reported cases of businesses losing large portions of their review history rather than just the flagged entries. A practice that spent two years building a review profile can lose most of it, and the genuine reviews go with the rest.

There is a second, quieter risk. Gated flows tend to produce clusters of reviews with an unusually high average and unusually similar timing. Google’s spam systems read that pattern as manipulation regardless of intent, so a gated practice can find its reviews filtered without ever being formally penalised, and without ever being told why.

Is review gating illegal in the UK?

Review gating is not named as a banned practice in UK law, but it can still put a practice in breach of consumer protection rules. This is where most articles on the subject go wrong, usually by importing American law, so the position is worth setting out carefully in two parts.

First, gating is not on the banned list. The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 brought in prohibitions on fake reviews and concealed incentivised reviews, in force since 6 April 2025. Schedule 20 of the Act lists commercial practices that are automatically unfair. Review gating as such is not one of them. Articles claiming otherwise are usually citing the US Federal Trade Commission rule from 2024, which has no application to a dental practice in the UK.

Second, that is not the end of the analysis. The DMCC Act also requires that consumer reviews, and information derived from them, are not published in a misleading way. A star rating is information derived from reviews. If a published rating was produced by a process that excluded dissatisfied patients, there is a real question about whether it represents patient experience honestly. The CMA fake reviews guidance (CMA208) addresses exactly this territory.

So the accurate position is this. Review gating is a certain breach of Google policy, and a plausible route into a breach of UK consumer law through the misleading presentation route rather than the fake review route. That is a narrower claim than "gating is illegal", and it is the one that survives scrutiny.

Why the regulatory temperature has risen

The DMCC Act gave the Competition and Markets Authority direct enforcement powers. Previously the CMA generally had to take a business to court. It can now investigate, decide the law has been broken, order changes and impose fines itself, up to 10% of global turnover.

After a three month grace period ended in mid 2025, the CMA ran a sweep of review platforms and reported that a substantial proportion of the websites it examined could be falling short of the new obligations. In March 2026 it opened its first formal investigations into businesses over fake and misleading reviews. The enforcement phase has begun.

For a single dental practice, the realistic risk is not a CMA investigation. It is Google removing your reviews, and a patient noticing that your five star profile does not match what they experienced.

The obligation most practices have never heard of

Any UK dental practice that displays patient reviews, a star rating, or a line such as "rated 4.9 by our patients" on its own website is publishing consumer review information under the DMCC Act 2024. That carries a positive obligation: take reasonable and proportionate steps to prevent misleading review material appearing, and be able to explain how your reviews are handled.

This is a genuine shift. The old question was whether a practice had done anything dishonest. The new question is whether a practice can show that what it publishes is representative. A practice that gates its review collection and then displays the resulting average on its homepage is answering that second question badly.

Two practical steps follow.

1. Check how your review software actually works. Many practice management and marketing tools shipped with a sentiment filter switched on by default, because for years it was a selling point. If you inherited a system from a predecessor or an agency, check the settings rather than assuming.
2. Be able to describe your process in one sentence. "We invite every patient by SMS two days after their appointment, with no screening question" is a defensible answer. If describing your process out loud feels uncomfortable, that discomfort is telling you something.

Six versions of review gating that practices do not recognise

Explicit two button filters are easy to spot. These are the versions that persist in otherwise careful practices.

• Conditional wording. "If you were happy with your visit today, please leave us a Google review." No software filter is involved. The sentence does the filtering, because patients who were not happy read it as an instruction not to review.
• Staff discretion. No written policy, but the team asks patients who seemed pleased and quietly skips the ones who did not. This is gating carried out by judgement instead of by code, and it is probably the most common form in dental practices.
• The satisfaction survey that routes. An internal survey is good practice. It becomes gating the moment the score determines who then sees a review link.
• Selective timing. Sending review requests only after treatments that usually go well, while quietly omitting the appointment types that generate complaints.
• The withheld QR code. A card handed to patients who seemed happy and kept under the desk for those who did not. The mechanism is a receptionist rather than a redirect, but the effect is identical.
• Publishing only the good ones. Displaying a hand picked selection of five star reviews on your website as though it represents overall feedback. This one does not touch your Google profile at all. It goes directly to the publisher obligation described above.

A useful test: if a patient could see your entire review process laid out in front of them, would any part of it embarrass you? Review gating survives on the assumption that nobody will examine the mechanism, only the rating.

Review gating compared with compliant feedback collection

The distinction is not whether a practice collects private feedback. It is whether that feedback decides who gets asked publicly.

Who receives a public review request

• Compliant: every patient in the appointment category, without exception
• Gating: only patients who indicated satisfaction, or who seemed pleased

The role of a feedback form

• Compliant: offered to everyone, in addition to the public invitation
• Gating: used as a destination for unhappy patients instead of the public invitation

The wording of the request

• Compliant: "We’d welcome your honest feedback"
• Gating: "If you were happy today, please review us"

What a screening question does

• Compliant: informs the practice, and changes nothing about who is asked
• Gating: determines which page the patient lands on next

The resulting rating

• Compliant: lower on average, and an accurate reflection of patient experience
• Gating: higher on average, and unrepresentative, which is the reason it is prohibited

Durability

• Compliant: the reviews stay
• Gating: the reviews are removable at any time, including retrospectively

That fifth pair is the one that changes minds. Compliant collection genuinely does produce a lower average. A practice moving away from gating should expect its rating to drift down, and should treat that as the system beginning to tell the truth rather than as a problem to be solved.

What to do instead

The compliant model runs two channels in parallel, both offered to every patient.

1. An open invitation to review publicly, sent on identical terms to every patient in the relevant appointment category, with sentiment neutral wording and no screening step.
2. A visible route to raise a concern directly, publicised to all patients. This is offered alongside the public invitation, never as an alternative to it.

A patient may use both, one, or neither. What matters is that their answer to the second never changes their access to the first. Most patients who feel genuinely heard through a direct channel do not go on to post an angry public review, but that has to be a consequence of good service recovery rather than the design goal of the system.

For the practical mechanics, including timing by appointment type, wording you can use, and the rules on incentives, see our guide to asking patients for Google reviews compliantly.

What to do if your practice has been gating reviews

This is more common than the industry admits, and the remedy is straightforward.

1. Turn the filter off. Check the settings in your review or practice management software rather than trusting the sales description.
2. Rewrite the request. Remove any conditional phrasing. "Honest feedback" replaces "if you were happy".
3. Brief the team. Staff discretion is the hardest form to remove, because it does not feel like a policy. It needs to be replaced by one: everyone gets asked, and it is not the team’s call.
4. Leave existing reviews alone. Do not delete or attempt to alter past reviews. They are genuine. The collection method was the problem, not the reviews.
5. Expect the average to fall. It should. A 4.6 that reflects everyone is worth considerably more than a 4.9 that reflects only the patients you selected.

Summary

Review gating is filtering patients by sentiment before asking them for a public review. Google prohibits it, and reviews gathered that way can be removed at any point, genuine or not. UK law does not name gating as a banned practice, but it does regulate the misleading presentation of review information, and a rating built by excluding dissatisfied patients sits directly in that territory. Practices displaying reviews on their own website carry publisher obligations on top.

The compliant alternative is not complicated. Ask every patient, in the same way, and give each of them a real route to tell you when something went wrong.

Sources

• Google, Maps user-generated content policy
• Competition and Markets Authority, Fake reviews guidance (CMA208)
• Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, Schedule 20
• General Dental Council, Guidance on advertising