The FTC's Fake Review Rule: What Every Utah Business Owner Needs to Know

What the FTC rule prohibits

The FTC's final rule on fake reviews and testimonials (16 CFR Part 465) prohibits six specific practices:

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  Creating fake reviews: Businesses cannot create or commission reviews that claim to be from real customers when they are not. This includes AI-generated reviews, reviews from company insiders posing as customers, and reviews purchased from review farms.
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  Buying positive reviews: Paying anyone — including your own employees — for a positive review without clear disclosure is prohibited. This applies whether payment is cash, gift cards, free products, or any other incentive.
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  Suppressing negative reviews: Threatening legal action against reviewers for negative reviews, or using legal notices to force platforms to remove honest negative reviews, is prohibited. Offering incentives to customers specifically to change or remove a negative review is also prohibited.
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  Insider reviews without disclosure: If an employee, officer, or relative of a company leaves a review for that company, the relationship must be clearly disclosed. Undisclosed insider reviews are treated as deceptive.
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  Buying fake social proof: Purchasing fake followers, views, or engagement to misrepresent your business's popularity or endorsement is covered under the rule.
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  Disseminating fake reviews through third parties: Knowingly sharing, distributing, or publicizing reviews that you know to be fake is itself a violation — even if you did not create them.

What is still allowed

The rule does not prohibit all relationship between businesses and reviews. These practices remain legal:

• ✓Asking customers to leave an honest review (without conditioning the request on a positive outcome)
• ✓Providing a complimentary experience to a reviewer, as long as the reviewer clearly discloses the relationship and is free to write an honest — including negative — review
• ✓Responding to reviews, including negative ones
• ✓Displaying only a subset of reviews on your own website, as long as you do not misrepresent the overall distribution of ratings
• ✓Working with a verified review platform that discloses the business relationship and requires honest reviews from verified visitors

How to get reviews the right way

The safest way to build your review profile is to make it easy for real customers to leave honest reviews. Here are compliant tactics:

• ✓Send a follow-up email after a purchase asking for an honest review. Do not offer discounts in exchange.
• ✓Add a QR code at your register or table that links to your Google Business Profile.
• ✓Train staff to mention reviews naturally — "If you enjoyed your visit, we would love to hear from you."
• ✓Use a verified review platform like ReView Me Right that sends a disclosed, ID-verified reviewer to visit in person and write an honest account.

How ReView Me Right stays compliant

ReView Me Right was designed from the ground up to operate inside FTC guidelines. Every reviewer discloses that their visit was sponsored by the business through our platform. Reviewers sign an agreement requiring an honest review — not a positive one. Negative reviews are published when warranted. We require businesses to cease any fake review activity as a condition of using the platform.

The result is a verified review that is both credible to consumers and legally sound for the business that commissioned it.