Google review requests by text

A Google review tool sends your customer a text with a link to your Google listing, shortly after their visit, and keeps track of who has already been asked.

What a Google review tool must not do, as of April 2026, is decide who gets that link. Google's review policy prohibits selectively soliciting positive reviews, and it is now enforced. Where Google finds evidence of the practice it can remove the reviews, and in some cases a business's entire review history.

Textstr sends the same request to every customer.

What Google allows and what it does not

Asking for reviews is allowed. These are the things the policy prohibits:

Asking only the customers who seem happy, or surveying first and gating on the answer
Offering a discount, entry into a draw, or anything else in exchange for a review
Setting staff targets for the number of reviews collected
Telling a customer what the review should say, or handing them wording to paste
Standing over a customer while they write it
Discouraging or suppressing a negative review

How the request works

Asked once, after the visit

Each customer gets one request, timed to the end of the conversation rather than on a fixed schedule, and sent inside your opening hours. Nobody is asked a second time.

The same message for everyone

No survey in front of it, no sentiment check, no branching. The customer gets the link and writes whatever they think.

A private route offered alongside, not instead

The text also carries a way to reply straight to you. It is shown to every customer next to the review link, not substituted for it when someone seems unhappy. That substitution is the thing Google bans.

What you can see

Who was asked, who opened the link, and who has already been asked so will not be asked again.

Why the timing is the part that matters

Review requests fail for one of two reasons: they arrive days later when the visit has faded, or they arrive in a channel nobody checks. Text solves the second. Sending it off the back of the conversation rather than a nightly batch solves the first.

Textstr already carries the conversation, so it can tell when the visit has run its course. That is a better trigger than a timer, and it is the one part of this that does not require plugging into your DMS.

Frequently asked questions

Can I ask customers for Google reviews by text?

Yes. Google permits asking for reviews. The request has to go to customers generally rather than to a selected group, and it cannot be tied to an incentive or to wording you supply.

Will Google remove reviews that came from a text request?

Not for being requested. Reviews are removed when there is evidence of gating, incentives or other manipulation. An unfiltered request sent to every customer is not any of those.

Can unhappy customers be sent somewhere private instead?

Instead, no. As well, yes. Offering everyone both a review link and a private reply in the same message is a choice you give the customer. Showing the private form only to the people who rated you badly is gating.

Does a higher volume of reviews help local ranking?

Review count and rating are among the signals Google uses for local results, and recency counts too. We are not going to put a number on the effect, because anyone who does is guessing.