Review gating is illegal in Australia — here's what the ACCC says

There's a feature built into a surprising number of review tools: ask the customer how their experience was first, then route the happy ones to Google and the unhappy ones to a private feedback form nobody else sees.

It's called review gating. In the US it violates Google's policy and FTC rules. In Australia it's worse than a policy problem — the ACCC treats it as misleading or deceptive conduct under the Australian Consumer Law, and the Federal Court has already fined a major company millions for a version of it.

If you run a local business in Australia and a vendor pitches you "smart review routing," this post is what you need to know before you sign.

The law that applies

There's no statute called the "review gating act." The relevant law is broader and older:

• Section 18 of the Australian Consumer Law — a business must not engage in conduct that is misleading or deceptive, or likely to mislead or deceive.
• Section 29 — a business must not make false or misleading representations about its goods or services, including testimonials.

The ACCC's position, set out in its guidance on managing online reviews, is that the overall impression your review profile creates counts as conduct. If you systematically stop negative experiences from becoming public reviews while encouraging positive ones, the resulting star rating misleads consumers — even though every individual review on the page is genuine.

That's the part that surprises owners. You don't need fake reviews to break the law. A curated set of real ones does it.

The case that proves it: Meriton

In 2017 the Federal Court found Meriton Serviced Apartments — one of Australia's biggest accommodation providers — had engaged in misleading conduct over exactly this mechanic.

TripAdvisor ran a program that emailed guests after checkout inviting them to review their stay. Meriton's staff identified guests likely to leave negative reviews — people who'd complained at the desk, or stayed during a service outage — and either inserted extra characters into their email addresses before passing them to TripAdvisor or withheld the addresses entirely. The review invitations never arrived.

No fake reviews were written. No real reviews were deleted. Meriton simply filtered who got asked — which is precisely what a review-gating widget does, just with a spreadsheet instead of a pop-up. The court found this created a more positive impression of Meriton's properties than the truth supported, and in 2018 ordered a $3 million penalty.

The ACCC has kept pressing since:

• Aveling Homes (2017): a Perth builder ran review websites it secretly controlled and removed negative posts. Penalty: $380,000.
• Service Seeking (2020): the tradie marketplace let businesses write their own reviews and publish them as if customers had. Penalty: $600,000.

Different mechanics, same principle: shaping the public picture of customer sentiment misleads the people relying on it.

The penalties got much bigger

Those numbers are historic. Since November 2022, the maximum penalty for a company breaching these provisions is the greater of $50 million, three times the benefit gained, or 30% of adjusted turnover during the breach period. For individuals it's $2.5 million.

No one expects the ACCC to seek $50 million from a cafe. But the regulator has publicly listed fake and misleading online reviews among its enforcement priorities, it runs sweeps of review practices, and penalties scale with the conduct. "We used the tool our marketing platform sold us" has never been a defence — under the ACL, the conduct is yours.

What gating looks like in the wild

Vendors rarely call it gating. Watch for these pitches:

• "We ask customers to rate their experience first, then route them based on the score."
• "Negative feedback goes straight to your inbox instead of Google."
• "Filter out unhappy customers before they post."
• A star-rating screen where 4–5 stars opens Google and 1–3 stars opens a private form.

All of these are the Meriton mechanic in software form. They also violate Google's review policy independently — so even if the ACCC never looks at you, Google can remove your reviews or suspend your Business Profile when its detection catches the pattern.

What's legal — and works almost as well

The compliant version is simpler than the gated one:

1. Ask every customer, the same way. No pre-screening question, no rating filter deciding who gets the Google link.
2. Offer both doors at once. Public review and private feedback, side by side, equal prominence, every customer chooses freely. A private channel is completely legal — what's illegal is making it the only door for unhappy customers.
3. Never pay or incentivise for reviews, and never write your own. (Covered in detail in the policy guide.)
4. Handle the negative ones in public, calmly — we wrote templates for that.

Here's the part the gating vendors don't mention: the honest version captures most of the benefit anyway. Unhappy customers mostly don't want an audience — they want the problem fixed. Given a genuine private option alongside the public one, many take it voluntarily. You get the early warning without touching the law, because the customer made the choice, not your software.

That's the entire difference between a feedback channel and a gate: who decides. When the customer picks the door, you're running good customer service. When your tool picks it for them based on a rating, you're curating your public reputation — and in Australia, that's the conduct the Federal Court fined Meriton $3 million for.

This is general information, not legal advice. If you're unsure whether a specific practice complies with the ACL, talk to a lawyer or check the ACCC's published guidance on online reviews.