The answer is that it is legal and it will get your reviews deleted. Those two things are true at once, from two different authorities, and almost every article on this subject gets one half of it wrong.
That is a good illustration of why this topic is worth doing carefully. The rules come from two places that do not agree, and the penalties for guessing are real.
Start with the only mechanism that works
People do not review businesses spontaneously. They review them when asked. I have covered how far the standards consumers apply have moved, including the finding that a business with fewer than twenty reviews is filtered out by nearly half the market before anything else about it is considered.
So this post is about execution. Not whether to ask. How to ask so that it works, and where the boundaries are.
The arithmetic nobody does
If you need twenty reviews, how many people do you contact?
A useful survey figure is that 65 percent of consumers left a review after being prompted by a business in the past year. It is tempting to divide twenty by that and conclude you need thirty one asks.
Do not do that. The figure describes how many people reviewed something at some point after some prompt across a whole year. It is not the conversion rate of a single request, and treating it as one is exactly the kind of statistical stretch I have complained about elsewhere on this site.
The honest version is that nobody has published a reliable per request rate, and the practical rate for a small business asking well is considerably lower than sixty five percent. Plan on contacting every past customer you have, expect a minority to act, and treat twenty as a target that takes a few months rather than a weekend.
The useful discipline is converting the vague goal into a list of names. Get reviews is not a task. Contact these forty one people is a task.
The link is most of the battle
Here is the most common mechanical failure, and it is almost comically simple.
Businesses ask people to leave a Google review without giving them a direct link. The customer has to search for the business, find the right listing, scroll to reviews, find the write a review button, then be signed in to the right account. That is five steps on a phone, each one an opportunity to abandon.
Google generates a short review link for your profile. It opens the review box directly. Find it in your Business Profile under the option to ask for reviews, and put it in every request you send.
If you take one thing from this post, it is that the difference between a link and an instruction is most of your response rate. Every step you remove is people who would have meant to and then did not.
What the message should say
Short, specific, from a person, with no marketing language in it.
Name what you did for them. A review request that says we value your feedback could have come from anyone. One that says thanks again for trusting us with the kitchen floor reminds them of the specific thing they were pleased about, which is the thing you want them writing about.
Say what it helps with, honestly. Most people will help a small business if they understand why it matters, and reviews help us get found is both true and sufficient.
Keep it to three sentences and one link. Anything longer reads as a campaign and gets treated as one.
Ask for a sentence, not a review. The word review implies an essay somebody has to compose. Asking what they would tell a friend who needed the same work lowers the bar to something they can do at a traffic light.
Timing
Ask when the result is visible and the feeling is current. Not at the moment of payment, which is associated with parting from money, and not weeks later when the specifics have faded.
For project work that usually means a few days after completion, once they have lived with the result. For a quick service it means the same day.
One follow up is reasonable. Two is pestering. If somebody does not respond to a request and a reminder, they have answered.
The incentive question, properly answered
Now the thing at the top of this post.
The Federal Trade Commission's rule on consumer reviews, effective October 2024, does not prohibit giving incentives for reviews. What it prohibits is conditioning the incentive on the review expressing a particular sentiment. Paying for positive reviews is out. A generalized offer sent to all purchasers, with no requirement about what the review says, is within the rule.
Google's policy is stricter and it is the one that actually governs your Google reviews. Google prohibits offering payment, discounts, or free goods or services in exchange for a review, full stop. Reviews obtained that way are removed from Maps, and Google states that behavior breaking its rules can lead to anything from suspended account privileges to account termination.
So: legal, against the rules, and the rules are enforced by the party holding your listing.
The practical answer is do not offer anything. The FTC permission is of no use to you on the platform where your reviews matter, and the downside is not a fine but the erasure of the reviews you worked for, plus risk to the profile itself.
Gating, and the same split
Review gating means surveying customers first and only directing the happy ones to the public review page.
The FTC's position is that asking only the customers you expect to be happy is not specifically barred by the rule, though staff note it could violate the FTC Act, and that excluding reviews on the basis of negativity is a concern.
Google is unambiguous. Merchants may not selectively solicit positive reviews, and may not discourage or block negative ones.
Beyond the rules, gating is self defeating for a reason I find more persuasive than either. A profile of unbroken five star reviews reads as purchased, and the research on this is consistent that a perfect rating converts worse than a very good one. The occasional four star review with a mild complaint is doing useful work for you.
Friends, family and staff
The FTC addresses this directly, and the answer is more permissive than people assume, with a condition that matters.
Insider reviews are allowed if the relationship is clearly and conspicuously disclosed. Your cousin can review your business if the review says they are your cousin. The disclosure has to be unavoidable, which means in the first line of the review. A hyperlink or a disclosure that only appears on hover does not count.
The warning attached is worth noting: if insider reviews materially raise your star rating, the FTC Act may be in play even with disclosures.
My view is that this is a bad use of a favor. A disclosed family review carries little weight with readers and a small amount of risk with regulators, and the person would be more useful to you as a referral.
The one worth more than the others
A review from somebody who had a problem that you fixed is worth several from customers for whom everything went smoothly.
It is the only kind that answers the question readers are actually asking, which is what happens if this goes wrong. Nobody can tell from a page of perfect reviews.
So when a job goes sideways and you sort it out properly, that is the moment to ask, awkward as it feels. The customer usually remembers the recovery more vividly than the problem, and what they write will do more for you than a dozen easy ones.
Caveats
The FTC material here comes from staff guidance, which the FTC itself notes is not definitive legal guidance and provides no safe harbor. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. Google's policies change without much announcement, so check the current version rather than trusting a post.
The summary
Ask everybody, with a direct link, in three sentences, a few days after they can see the result.
Offer nothing in exchange, not because the FTC forbids it but because Google does and Google holds your listing.
Do not filter for the happy ones, because both the platform and the arithmetic of trust are against you.
And ask the customer whose job went wrong and got fixed. That one is worth the most and almost nobody asks for it.