Is review gating illegal in New Zealand and Australia?

Review gating means filtering who gets asked to leave a public review based on how happy they are. In practice it looks like asking "how did we do?" first, then only showing the Google link to people who pick the positive answer and routing everyone else to a private form.

It is a grey-area tactic that a lot of review tools were built around. In New Zealand and Australia it is unlawful, and regulators have acted on it.

This is general information, not legal advice. If you are unsure about your situation, talk to a lawyer.

New Zealand: the Fair Trading Act

The Fair Trading Act 1986 prohibits misleading and deceptive conduct in trade. Selectively presenting only positive reviews, or engineering your review profile by suppressing negative feedback, misleads consumers about what other customers actually experienced.

Bachcare (2019). The holiday home management company was fined NZD 117,000 after the Commerce Commission found it had published only favourable guest reviews and withheld negative ones, and had removed reviews below a threshold. The Commission's position was clear: a curated review profile that hides unfavourable feedback is misleading conduct.

Australia: the Australian Consumer Law

Section 18 of the Australian Consumer Law prohibits misleading or deceptive conduct. The ACCC has run repeated enforcement sweeps on fake and manipulated reviews, and has specifically named sectors including trades and home services.

Meriton (2017). The apartment operator was penalised AUD 3 million by the Federal Court for manipulating its reviews on TripAdvisor. One method: withholding guests' email addresses from the review platform's prompts when it expected those guests to be unhappy, so the negative reviews never got requested. The court treated that selective suppression as misleading conduct.

The ACCC has continued to pursue review manipulation since, and treats gating, incentivised reviews, and undisclosed fake reviews as related problems.

United States, for reference

The FTC's Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials (16 CFR Part 465), in force since 2024, explicitly bans review suppression, including practices that stop or discourage people from submitting negative reviews, and undisclosed AI or bot-written testimonials. Penalties can run to tens of thousands of US dollars per violation.

What you can do instead

Asking every customer for honest feedback is fine and encouraged. The line is about what you do with the ask.

• Show the public review option to everyone. Same screen, same prominence, every customer, no pre-question that routes them.
• Offer a private channel as well, not instead. It is fine to give unhappy customers an easy way to come to you first. It is not fine to make that the only path they see.
• Do not incentivise. No discounts, draws, or rewards for reviews.
• Do not write or buy reviews, and do not get staff or family to.
• Let the customer write and post their own review, in their own words.

Done this way, most unhappy customers still choose to tell you privately, so you get the chance to fix things, and you stay well inside the law.