Can employees leave Google reviews for their own employer?

The rule runs both ways

Most people meet Google's conflict-of-interest rule from the wrong end: a competitor or an ex-employee posts something damaging, and the rule is the clause that gets it removed. The same sentence covers the friendly version. A review is a conflict of interest when the reviewer has a personal or business relationship with the business, and employment is a business relationship.

That makes a staff five-star and a competitor one-star the same kind of violation. Neither is about whether the review is true. An employee might sincerely think the place is excellent, and the review still breaks the rule, because the rule is about who is writing rather than what they wrote.

Who the clause covers

Wider than most owners expect, and the edges are where the trouble usually is.

• Current employees, including part-time and casual staff, and including people who genuinely are customers as well
• Former employees, whether the review is favourable or not
• Owners, directors and anyone with a financial interest in the business
• Family members of the above, where the connection is apparent
• Contractors, suppliers and anyone whose income depends on the business
• Anyone asked to post from a device or network the business controls, which can tie unconnected accounts together whatever the relationship

Why it is worse than the reviews being removed

If the only consequence were losing a few five-star reviews, this would be a small problem. It is not what tends to happen.

A run of accounts with a shared connection all praising one listing in a short window is the pattern Google's abuse detection is designed to catch, and the action available to it is not limited to the individual reviews. Published consequences for review manipulation run to the listing itself. You can lose reviews you earned honestly along with the ones you did not, and the account that owns the listing is yours rather than the reviewers'.

There is a quieter cost too. If your average is propped up by staff reviews and a genuine bad one arrives, the case for removing the genuine one has to be made on a listing whose history already looks engineered. That is a worse position to argue from than a listing with a few honest low ratings on it.

What to do if they are already there

First, stop asking. An owner who keeps requesting them after reading this is building the pattern deliberately, and intent shows up in timing.

Second, be realistic about what you can undo. A reviewer can delete their own review, and an employee who posted one can be asked to take it down, which is cleaner than leaving it and hoping. Nobody else can remove it on their behalf.

Third, separate this from the review you were actually worried about. If a negative review on the listing breaks a published clause, that case stands on its own evidence and is worth making. Google makes the final call on every removal, and a listing with fewer manufactured reviews on it is a better place to make that case from.

What you can ask your team to do instead

Ask them to bring in real customers rather than to write reviews. A member of staff who mentions to a happy customer that a review helps is doing something useful and allowed; the same member of staff writing the review is not.

The other thing worth doing is unglamorous: ask every customer, not only the pleased ones. A listing that collects reviews steadily from a wide spread of real accounts is both more credible to a reader and much harder for one bad week to dent.