What the FTC's Review Rule actually says — and what it costs to break it
Since October 21, 2024, asking only happy customers for a review, offering a gift card for a five-star one, or having staff post as customers isn't a gray area — it's conduct banned by name in 16 CFR Part 465, the FTC's first standalone rule on reviews. The rule carries a real number: the FTC can currently seek a civil penalty of up to $53,088 per violation, the 2025 inflation-adjusted maximum that stayed in force through 2026 after the White House canceled that year's adjustment. The older $51,744 figure still floating around from 2024 press coverage is out of date — every row below is the current text and the current dollar figure, quoted and dated.
| Metric | Value | Period | Source | Cite |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Effective date of the FTC's Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, 16 CFR Part 465 Any review or testimonial practice on your site or listings has been subject to a specific, litigable rule — not just general guidance — since October 21, 2024. The rule was published in the Federal Register on August 22, 2024 and became enforceable 60 days later; it is the FTC's first standalone trade regulation rule on reviews, so conduct before this date was pursued only under the general unfairness/deception standard of FTC Act Section 5. Verbatim from the sourcewhich went into effect on October 21, 2024 Checked 2026-09-09 | October 21, 2024date | 2024 | Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule: Questions and Answers | |
What 16 CFR 465.2 bans: writing, creating, or selling a review that misrepresents whether the reviewer exists, used the product, or had the described experience Never write, commission, or buy a review for your own business, including from an AI tool or a freelance-writing marketplace — the rule reaches the buyer as well as the writer. This includes AI-generated reviews of a product or business that was never actually used, and applies to the business, not just to whoever physically wrote the fake review. Verbatim from the sourceIt is an unfair or deceptive act or practice and a violation of this part for a business to write, create, or sell a consumer review, consumer testimonial, or celebrity testimonial that materially misrepresents, expressly or by implication Checked 2026-09-09 | Bannedlegal status | in effect since October 21, 2024 | Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, 16 CFR 465.2 (text of the FTC rule) | |
What 16 CFR 465.4 bans: compensating or incentivizing a review conditioned on it expressing a particular sentiment, positive or negative A discount, gift card, or free service offered in exchange for a review — even one that only asks for an 'honest' review — is a violation if it is conditioned on the review's sentiment; unconditional post-purchase review requests with no sentiment tied to any reward are the safe pattern. The ban covers negative-sentiment reviews too — paying a competitor's customers to leave one-star reviews is banned by the same clause that bans paying for five-star ones. Verbatim from the sourceIt is an unfair or deceptive act or practice and a violation of this part for a business to provide compensation or other incentives in exchange for, or conditioned expressly or by implication on, the writing or creation of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, whether positive or negative, regarding the product, service, or business that is the subject of the review. Checked 2026-09-09 | Bannedlegal status | in effect since October 21, 2024 | Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, 16 CFR 465.4 (text of the FTC rule) | |
What 16 CFR 465.5 requires: officers, managers, employees, agents, or their immediate relatives must disclose their relationship to the business when reviewing it If you, a manager, an employee's spouse, or anyone you gave a free product or payment to leaves a review of your business, the review must disclose that — silence is the violation, not the review itself. This is the operative text of subsection (c)(1), which bars an officer or manager from soliciting reviews from relatives, employees, or agents that come back without disclosure; separate subsections (a) and (b) impose the same disclosure duty when an officer or manager writes a review directly, or when the business disseminates a testimonial from its own staff. Generalized public solicitations to actual customers, and platforms merely hosting third-party reviews, are exempted. The broader FTC Endorsement Guides standard behind this rule is that a connection should be disclosed whenever, in the FTC's words, it 'would affect how they evaluate the endorsement' — which covers non-insiders given free products or payment, not only staff. Verbatim from the sourceIt is an unfair or deceptive act or practice and a violation of this part for an officer or manager of a business to solicit or demand a consumer review about the business or one of the products or services it sells from any of their immediate relatives or from any employee or agent of the business Checked 2026-09-09 | Disclosure requiredlegal status | in effect since October 21, 2024 | Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, 16 CFR 465.5 (text of the FTC rule) | |
What 16 CFR 465.6 bans: falsely claiming a website or entity a business controls provides independent reviews of that business's own products If you run a 'best of' or comparison microsite that ranks your own service, do not present it as an independent third-party source. This targets 'independent' comparison or review sites secretly owned by the business being reviewed — the violation is the false claim of independence, not the existence of a company-run review section per se. Verbatim from the sourceIt is an unfair or deceptive act or practice and a violation of this part for a business to materially misrepresent, expressly or by implication, that a website, organization, or entity that it controls, owns, or operates provides independent reviews or opinions, other than consumer reviews, about a category of businesses, products, or services including the business or one or more of the products or services it sells. Checked 2026-09-09 | Bannedlegal status | in effect since October 21, 2024 | Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, 16 CFR 465.6 (text of the FTC rule) | |
What 16 CFR 465.7 bans: (a) using unfounded legal threats, physical threats, intimidation, or false accusations to prevent or remove a review, and (b) representing that displayed reviews reflect all or most submitted reviews when negative or low-rated ones have been suppressed Never threaten a reviewer to get a bad review taken down, and never let a review widget auto-publish only four- and five-star reviews while holding back the rest — both are separate violations of the same section. Two distinct bans in one section: threats/intimidation used to suppress a review (465.7(a)), and displaying reviews in a way that misrepresents suppression already done (465.7(b)) — the exact conduct the FTC had already penalized Fashion Nova for in 2022, before this rule existed. The section still permits removing reviews that are defamatory, harassing, obscene, fake, or wholly unrelated to the product or service. Verbatim from the sourceUsing unfounded legal threats, physical threats, intimidation, or false accusations "in an attempt to prevent a review or any portion thereof from being written or created, or cause a review or any portion thereof to be removed." ... A business cannot materially misrepresent that displayed consumer reviews "represent most or all the reviews submitted to the website or platform when reviews are being suppressed based upon their ratings or their negative sentiment." Checked 2026-09-09 | Bannedlegal status | in effect since October 21, 2024 | Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, 16 CFR 465.7 (text of the FTC rule) | |
What 16 CFR 465.8 bans: selling, distributing, buying, or procuring fake indicators of social media influence (e.g., bot followers or fake engagement) known to be fake Buying followers, views, or engagement for your business's social accounts is a distinct, separate violation from fake reviews — treat any 'growth service' selling bulk followers as a legal risk, not just a waste of money. Covers both sides of the transaction: the seller of fake followers/views and the business that knowingly buys them. Verbatim from the sourceSell or distribute fake indicators of social media influence that they knew or should have known to be fake and that can be used by individuals or businesses to materially misrepresent their influence or importance for a commercial purpose Checked 2026-09-09 | Bannedlegal status | in effect since October 21, 2024 | Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, 16 CFR 465.8 (text of the FTC rule) | |
FTC guidance on review gating: soliciting reviews only from customers likely to respond favorably can itself be deceptive A review-request tool that filters unhappy customers to a private feedback form and only sends happy customers to Google/Yelp is the exact pattern the FTC calls potentially deceptive — route every customer to the same review ask. This is FTC staff guidance under the Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255), a policy statement rather than a standalone rule with its own penalty provision, and it does not use the term 'review gating' itself. Verbatim from the sourceOnly asking for reviews from customers who you think are more likely to be happy with your product would be misleading if it substantially skews the favorability of the reviews. Checked 2026-09-09 | Deceptive if it skews favorabilityguidance status | current guidance, accessed 2026-09-09 | Federal Trade Commission, FTC's Endorsement Guides: What People Are Asking | |
Maximum civil penalty per violation of the Consumer Review Rule the FTC can currently seek, as stated in its own December 2025 enforcement warning letters Do not treat this as 'a $53,088 fine' — it is the ceiling per violation, and a review-suppression scheme touching thousands of reviews multiplies that ceiling, so the real exposure of a systematic scheme is far larger than the headline number suggests. This is a maximum per violation, not a single fixed fine — each fake or suppressed review, or each day a violation continues, can count as a separate violation, so total exposure for a pattern of fake reviews can run into the millions. The figure is the 2025 inflation adjustment; the White House OMB canceled the 2026 inflation adjustment (memo M-26-11, April 17, 2026), so $53,088 remains the current maximum as of this writing. Verbatim from the sourcecivil penalties of up to $53,088 per violation Checked 2026-09-09 | $53,088USD per violation (maximum) | adjustment effective January 17, 2025; unchanged for 2026 | Federal Trade Commission, FTC Warns 10 Companies About Possible Violations of the Agency's New Consumer Review Rule | |
FTC settlement amount against a retailer for suppressing negative reviews, the precedent the review-suppression rule codifies This is what the money at stake actually looked like before there was even a specific rule — a third-party review widget that silently holds back low-star reviews is exactly the mechanism that cost Fashion Nova $4.2 million. This case predates the 2024 rule and was brought under the FTC's general Section 5 unfairness/deception authority; the FTC's own release calls it the agency's first case over concealing negative reviews, and it is the direct precedent for 16 CFR 465.7(b). Verbatim from the sourceFashion Nova, LLC will be prohibited from suppressing customer reviews of its products and required to pay $4.2 million to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations that the company blocked negative reviews of its products from being posted to its website. Checked 2026-09-09 | $4.2 millionUSD, total settlement | settlement announced January 25, 2022, covering conduct from late 2015 to November 2019 | Federal Trade Commission, Fashion Nova will Pay $4.2 Million as part of Settlement of FTC Allegations it Blocked Negative Reviews of Products | |
What California Civil Code Section 1670.8 bans: contract clauses that waive a consumer's right to post a review or statement about the seller Never put a non-disparagement or no-negative-review clause in a customer contract or terms of service if you serve California customers — the clause itself is unlawful, not just unenforceable. Applies to any contract for the sale or lease of consumer goods or services with a California consumer, regardless of where the business is located; it does not stop a platform from removing an otherwise-lawful-to-remove review, and it does not protect defamatory statements. Verbatim from the sourceIt shall be unlawful to threaten or to seek to enforce a provision made unlawful under this section, or to otherwise penalize a consumer for making any statement protected under this section. Checked 2026-09-09 | Void and unenforceable; threatening to enforce one is itself unlawfullegal status | enacted 2014, current text accessed 2026-09-09 | California Legislative Information, Civil Code Section 1670.8 | |
Civil penalty tiers under California Civil Code Section 1670.8 for using or enforcing a banned non-disparagement clause These are per-violation, per-consumer-contract exposure figures at the state level — small compared to the federal FTC ceiling, but they stack with it if the same clause is used against California customers. The $10,000 figure applies only to violations found willful, intentional, or reckless; these are state penalties separate from and in addition to any FTC federal exposure for the same conduct. Verbatim from the sourcecivil penalty not to exceed two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500) for the first violation, and five thousand dollars ($5,000) for the second and for each subsequent violation Checked 2026-09-09 | $2,500 first violation / $5,000 subsequent / $10,000 if willful, intentional, or recklessUSD, maximum civil penalty | current text accessed 2026-09-09 | California Legislative Information, Civil Code Section 1670.8 | |
What Google's Prohibited and Restricted Content policy bans: offering an incentive in exchange for a Business Profile review A 'leave us a review and get 10% off your next visit' offer violates Google's own policy and risks the review being removed or the profile being restricted, independent of the separate federal ban on the same conduct. Google's own restatement of the rule elsewhere on the same policy also bars conditioning a discount or removal on changing a review, and separately bars discouraging negative reviews or selectively soliciting positive ones. Verbatim from the sourceContent that has been posted due to an incentive offered by a business - such as payment, discounts, free goods and/or services. Checked 2026-09-09 | Prohibitedpolicy status | current policy, accessed 2026-09-09 | Google Business Profile Help, Prohibited and restricted content | |
What Google's policy bans regarding selective review solicitation and discouraging negative reviews A review-funnel tool that only sends the Google review link to customers who first answer a happy-face screener is the specific pattern this line bans — send the same review link to every customer. This is Google's platform-level version of the same review-gating concern the FTC raises in its Endorsement Guides guidance. Verbatim from the sourceDiscourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers Checked 2026-09-09 | Prohibitedpolicy status | current policy, accessed 2026-09-09 | Google Business Profile Help, Prohibited and restricted content | |
Yelp's policy on businesses asking customers to write a review Unlike Google, Yelp's official stance is that you should not ask for reviews at all, even without incentives — the safe move on Yelp is to make it easy to find your page, not to request a review directly. Yelp's enforcement is algorithmic and reputational, not a monetary penalty: solicited-looking reviews are filtered out of the recommended count and a public Consumer Alert can be posted on the business page. Verbatim from the sourceDon't ask anyone to review your business, be it customers, mailing list subscribers, friends, family, etc. Checked 2026-09-09 | Businesses should never askpolicy status | current policy, accessed 2026-09-09 | Yelp for Business, Don't Ask for Reviews | |
Yelp's policy on offering incentives (freebies, discounts, payment) in exchange for reviews Yelp is telling you, in its own words, that this practice is a legal risk and not only a platform-rules risk — treat it as such. Yelp's own guidance explicitly flags the legal risk, which is now the FTC's 465.4 ban on compensation conditioned on review sentiment. Verbatim from the sourceDon't offer freebies, discounts, or payment in exchange for reviews—it will turn off savvy consumers and may also be illegal. Checked 2026-09-09 | Prohibited, and may be illegalpolicy status | current policy, accessed 2026-09-09 | Yelp for Business, Don't Ask for Reviews |
Showing 16 of 16 rows
Where the sources disagree
We do not pick the “right” number for you. Where two honest sources count differently, both are here, along with the reason they differ.
The dollar figure for the maximum civil penalty per violation of the Consumer Review Rule
- $51,744 Federal Trade Commission, FTC Publishes Inflation-Adjusted Civil Penalty Amounts for 2024, effective January 10, 2024
- $53,088 Federal Trade Commission, FTC Warns 10 Companies About Possible Violations of the Agency's New Consumer Review Rule, effective January 17, 2025, unchanged for 2026
Not a substantive disagreement but a timing one: the FTC republishes the inflation-adjusted maximum every January under the Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act. $51,744 was current when the rule was announced in August 2024 and is the figure most articles from that period still cite; $53,088 has been current since January 17, 2025 and remains the figure in force because the White House Office of Management and Budget canceled the 2026 adjustment (OMB Memorandum M-26-11, April 17, 2026). Any source still citing $51,744 for the Consumer Review Rule specifically is quoting a superseded number.
What did not survive checking
These are claims we went looking for and could not confirm at the source. They are not in the table — and they are listed here so you do not spend time on them either.
- A specific total dollar amount the FTC has collected in civil penalties under the Consumer Review Rule itself (16 CFR Part 465) since it took effect
- As of the most recent enforcement news found (the FTC's December 22, 2025 warning letters to 10 unidentified companies), the agency has only issued warning letters, not filed suits or announced penalty payments, under this specific rule. No dollar amount collected under Part 465 exists yet to cite; the $4.2 million Fashion Nova figure (2022) was collected under the FTC's general Section 5 authority before the rule existed, so it is listed separately and labeled as pre-rule.
- A precise industry-wide total or percentage of fake reviews on major platforms
- Multiple industry-survey figures for 'percent of reviews that are fake' exist in circulation, but they come from private detection vendors without published, checkable methodology on a primary source page, which the brief's sourcing hierarchy excludes; none could be traced to a government, platform, or academic primary source in one click.
- The Sunday Riley (2020) FTC fake-review settlement as a second monetary enforcement example
- Checked via search of law-firm and FTC-adjacent summaries: the final consent order in that matter imposed no monetary redress, disgorgement, or civil penalty — only a conduct prohibition — so it does not belong in a row about 'the money at stake' and would misstate the case if listed alongside Fashion Nova's $4.2 million without that caveat; excluded rather than included with a workaround caveat, per the brief's 'if it does not check out, delete it' rule.
- A specific numeric definition of how many suppressed or fake reviews constitutes a separate 'violation' for civil-penalty-stacking purposes
- Neither 16 CFR Part 465 nor the FTC's Q&A page states a per-review or per-day counting rule for how violations are tallied toward the $53,088 ceiling; this is left to case-by-case enforcement and could not be verified against a primary source, so the note on ftc-civil-penalty-current states the ceiling is 'per violation' without asserting a specific multiplication method.
Methodology
All rows were pulled by opening the FTC's own rule text — via the Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute's mirror of 16 CFR Part 465, since ecfr.gov and federalregister.gov blocked automated fetches with a redirect wall — plus the FTC's own press releases and business-guidance pages, Google's and Yelp's own policy and help-center pages, and the California Legislative Information site's text of Civil Code 1670.8.
Selection favored the FTC rule sections that map onto the practices home-service owners actually run — asking only happy customers, paying for stars, having staff post as customers — plus two enforcement examples that state a dollar figure in the FTC's own words: Fashion Nova's pre-rule settlement, and the FTC's December 2025 warning-letter release. The two clauses of 465.7 were merged into a single row, and the superseded 2024 penalty figure was folded into the disagreements entry instead of given its own row. Any number sourced only from a law-firm summary, a blog, or a search snippet — without an FTC, platform, or state primary page opened directly — was left out; the dropped section records what was excluded and why.
This page is a reading of published rule text and agency and platform guidance — not legal advice. It states what 16 CFR Part 465, the FTC's guidance, California Civil Code 1670.8, and Google's and Yelp's own policies say, in their own words, as of the access date on each row. Whether a specific review practice violates any of this depends on facts this page cannot know, and civil penalty exposure for an actual case is a legal determination — take a suspected violation to a lawyer, not to this table.
Sources
- California Legislative Information, Civil Code Section 1670.8 2 rows
- Google Business Profile Help, Prohibited and restricted content 2 rows
- Yelp for Business, Don't Ask for Reviews 2 rows
- Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule: Questions and Answers 1 row
- Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, 16 CFR 465.2 (text of the FTC rule) 1 row
- Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, 16 CFR 465.4 (text of the FTC rule) 1 row
- Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, 16 CFR 465.5 (text of the FTC rule) 1 row
- Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, 16 CFR 465.6 (text of the FTC rule) 1 row
- Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, 16 CFR 465.7 (text of the FTC rule) 1 row
- Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, 16 CFR 465.8 (text of the FTC rule) 1 row
- Federal Trade Commission, FTC's Endorsement Guides: What People Are Asking 1 row
- Federal Trade Commission, FTC Warns 10 Companies About Possible Violations of the Agency's New Consumer Review Rule 1 row
- Federal Trade Commission, Fashion Nova will Pay $4.2 Million as part of Settlement of FTC Allegations it Blocked Negative Reviews of Products 1 row
How to cite this page
Husky Digital. Consumer Review Rule: what 16 CFR 465 actually bans. Last verified September 9, 2026. https://husky-digital.com/research/review-and-testimonial-rules/
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