How to use customer reviews and testimonials on your website, without misleading anyone

Why testimonials carry weight, and why the rules are strict

When someone is choosing a builder, a physio or an accountant they've never used, a few words from a past customer often do more than anything you say about yourself. That's exactly why testimonials are regulated. Consumer Affairs Victoria puts it simply: "It is unlawful to make, rely on or use false or misleading testimonials."

The rule isn't limited to review sites. Consumer Affairs Victoria notes testimonials can appear on a business's website, on independent review websites, in marketing emails and in newspapers, and the same Australian Consumer Law applies to all of them. So the quotes on your home page, the star rating in your header and the review you paste into an email campaign all need to hold up.

None of this should put you off. Genuine testimonials, collected and shown properly, are some of the most useful content a service website can have. The rest of this guide covers how to gather them, what you can and can't change, and what Google allows on top of the law.

What counts as a fake or misleading review

Business.gov.au says it's illegal under Australian Consumer Law to create or arrange a fake or misleading review. It lists the situations the ACCC treats as fake or misleading. Consumer Affairs Victoria adds that "Omitting negative reviews can be as misleading as posting false positive reviews", so a page that only ever shows the glowing ones can cross the line too.

Two practical points follow. First, be open about any connection: Consumer Affairs Victoria tells businesses to "Be transparent about commercial relationships with anyone providing a testimonial." Second, keep the evidence. It advises businesses to keep records of all customer reviews and testimonials, because "Courts may consider testimonials to be misleading unless you can prove otherwise."

The ACCC's list, as set out by business.gov.au, covers a review that is:

• Written by someone who hasn't used your product or service.
• Removed or changed by you, or someone else, after a customer posts it.
• Written by family, employees or people your business pays, without disclosing the connection.
• The result of an incentive to write a positive review.
• Incentivised without clearly disclosing the incentive.

Collect testimonials as part of finishing every job

The easiest way to stay on the right side of the rules is to ask everyone, not just the customers you expect to be happy. Make the request part of closing out a job, with a direct link to where you'd like the review. Business.gov.au suggests follow-up emails, direct links and a QR code on receipts, and notes you can only send a follow-up email if you have the customer's permission to email them.

For testimonials on your own website, ask the customer's permission to publish their words, and ask how they'd like to be named, such as first name and suburb. Save their original message with the date and the job it relates to. That record is your proof that the testimonial is real if anyone ever asks.

Let customers use their own words. Don't draft the testimonial for them or tell them what to mention. A specific, slightly rough comment about a real job is more believable than a polished paragraph anyway.

Keep readingCheck the privacy basics for customer details

Editing, trimming and showing them on your site

Treat a customer's words as theirs. Changing a review after it's posted is on the ACCC's list of what makes a review misleading, so don't alter reviews on Google or other platforms, and don't rewrite testimonials on your own site. If a long testimonial needs trimming, keep the meaning intact, check the shortened version with the customer and keep the full original on file.

How you display them matters as much as the words. Show a fair spread rather than only five-star comments, and if you quote an overall rating or review count, make sure it matches the source today and link to it so readers can check. Put each testimonial next to the service it describes, with a date where you can, so an old comment about a different service isn't doing the work for a new one.

Watch the images too. A stock photo beside a quote suggests that's the customer. Use a real photo with their permission, a photo of the actual job, or no photo at all.

Incentives: what the law allows and what Google doesn't

Australian law and Google's own rules differ here, and the stricter one applies on Google. Business.gov.au says offering an incentive is ok if you offer it for both positive and negative reviews and clearly disclose it.

Google Maps goes further. Its policy says merchants may not offer incentives, "such as payment, discounts, free goods and/or services", in exchange for posting any review, and incentivised reviews will be removed. It also doesn't allow businesses to discourage negative reviews or selectively solicit positive ones, to pressure customers into reviewing while on the premises, to ask for specific content, including naming a staff member, or to set staff a target number of reviews.

What Google does allow is asking customers to share a genuine experience, without an incentive or any attempt to influence the rating or what they write. In practice, that's the same simple request after every job described above.

Keep readingEarn Google reviews honestly and reply to them

Star ratings and review markup on your own site

Many owners hope that adding review markup to their testimonials will put gold stars next to their site in Google results. For a local business reviewing itself, Google's guidelines say it won't. If the business being reviewed controls the reviews about itself, its pages using LocalBusiness or Organization structured data are ineligible for the star review feature, whether the reviews are in the markup or come through an embedded widget such as Google Business or Facebook reviews.

The same guidelines say not to aggregate reviews or ratings from other websites, and not to include fake or undisclosed incentivised reviews on the page or in the markup. So spend the effort on genuine testimonials that help a reader decide, not on markup chasing stars that won't appear.

Keep readingSee which schema a service business actually needs

Worked example: a landscaper tidies up its testimonials page

This is a hypothetical example, not a client story. A Bendigo landscaping business has a testimonials page with nine five-star quotes. Three were typed up by the owner from phone calls, two came from family friends who got a discount, and the page header says "Rated 5 stars by our customers" with no link.

The owner keeps the four quotes that customers wrote themselves, after checking each customer is still happy to be named. They remove the phone-call versions and ask those customers to write a few lines in their own words. The family friends' quotes come down, since the connection and the discount weren't disclosed. The header is replaced with the current Google rating and a link to the profile.

From now on, every finished job gets the same message with a link to the Google profile and an invitation to reply with a comment for the website. No discount is offered for a Google review. Each testimonial on the site sits on the matching service page with the month of the job, and the originals are filed in the customer record.

A testimonial checklist for your website

Run through this list before a new website launches, and again whenever you add testimonials. If you're planning a new site, gather permissions and original messages before the build starts so the testimonials section isn't left waiting on content.

Demandify builds custom websites for service businesses, and a site's testimonials and evidence are part of that brief. This guide is general information, not legal advice; get advice for your specific situation.

Before you publish, check:

• Is every testimonial from a real customer, in their own words, with their permission?
• Have you kept the original message, the date and the job it relates to?
• Is any family, staff, paid or incentivised connection disclosed?
• Does the page show a fair spread, not just hand-picked five-star comments?
• Does any rating or review count match its source today, with a link?
• Are photos beside quotes genuinely of that customer or their job?
• Are you asking every customer for a Google review, without any incentive?

Keep readingGather testimonials and content in your website brief