Reviews when the customer is handing over everything they own

Why do reviews carry so much weight in this category?

Because there is nothing else to go on and the downside is total.

A customer choosing a restaurant risks an evening. A customer choosing a mover risks every object they own, on a day they cannot reschedule, with people they have never met inside their home. There is no trial, no sample, and no way to inspect the service before buying it.

So the customer does what people do when they cannot evaluate quality directly: they read what happened to other people. Volume tells them you exist. Recency tells them you still operate. Replies tell them what happens when something goes wrong, which is the thing they are actually worried about.

The review profile is the product demonstration in a business that cannot demonstrate its product. Treating it as a marketing side task is the most common strategic error in the industry.

What is Google's actual policy?

Short, specific, and mostly the opposite of what movers have been told.

Merchants are expressly allowed to "Solicit or encourage the posting of content that does represent a genuine experience, without offering incentives to do so or attempting to influence the rating or the contents of the review." Asking is fine. Asking everybody is fine.

Three things are not.

Incentives. Named directly: "Offer incentives - such as payment, discounts, free goods and/or services - in exchange for posting any review or revision or removal of a negative review." A discount on the final invoice for a review is the textbook case, and it is common in this trade.

Selection. "Discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers." This catches the popular workaround: a survey that asks how the move went, routes the happy customers to Google and the unhappy ones to a private complaint form. That is selective solicitation described exactly.

Pressure and direction. "When soliciting reviews, merchants should not require or pressure users to leave ratings or write reviews while on the premises, nor should they request that specific content be included."

That last one has a specific consequence for movers. Asking the crew to get a review before they leave the property is asking for a review on the premises, from a customer who is standing in an empty house with people who have just handled everything they own. It is the least free choice a customer will make all year.

Where does federal law sit on top of that?

Alongside it, with a safe harbor worth knowing by heart.

The Federal Trade Commission's rule on consumer reviews and testimonials, 16 CFR Part 465, has been in force since October 2024. Section 465.4 makes it an unfair or deceptive practice to provide incentives "in exchange for, or conditioned expressly or by implication on, the writing or creation of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment." The words doing the work are or by implication, because almost nobody says the quiet part out loud and the rule does not require them to.

Then the clause that protects you rather than catching you. Section 465.2(d) says the prohibitions do not apply to reviews that "resulted from a business making generalized solicitations to purchasers to post reviews or testimonials about their experiences."

Generalized solicitations to purchasers. Ask every completed move, do not condition on sentiment, do not script the content, and you are inside the safe harbor by construction rather than by argument.

Two more that catch small operators. Section 465.5 makes an owner liable where a staff review carries no disclosure of the relationship and the owner "did not instruct that prospective reviewers disclose clearly and conspicuously their relationship to the business," so saying nothing is the violation. And section 465.7(a) makes it a violation to use "an unfounded or groundless legal threat, a physical threat, intimidation, or a public false accusation" to prevent or remove a review, which retires the boilerplate letter to a one-star reviewer.

This is information, not legal advice.

When should the request go out?

After the truck leaves and before the exhaustion wears off, which is not the same as at the door.

Our recommendation, and it is operating judgment rather than a finding from a study: send the request the morning after the move. The customer has slept, the relief has arrived, and they are not being watched by the people they are reviewing.

Same-day is worse for two reasons. The customer is unpacking and irritated with the world in general, and the request lands while the crew is still on the premises or freshly gone, which is the situation the policy singles out.

Waiting a week is worse in the other direction. The specifics fade, the review gets shorter and vaguer, and vague reviews persuade nobody. The cadence by trade for other categories, and the reasoning behind each, is in the review request after the ticket closes.

Send once, then once more three or four days later, then stop.

What should the message say?

The specific job, the link, and nothing about content.

"Thanks for trusting us with Tuesday's move to Alameda. If you have a minute, a Google review helps other people find us: [link]" is the whole thing. Naming the job helps the customer remember what they are writing about. Anything longer reduces the response rate and anything more specific drifts toward the content direction rule.

Do not ask for five stars. Do not ask them to mention the crew leader by name, which many companies do believing it helps that person and which Google names as an example of prohibited conduct. Do not attach it to the invoice, because a request that arrives with a bill reads as a condition of the bill.

What about the bad ones?

Answer them, in public, without arguing, and understand that this is the part being read.

A prospective customer reading your profile is not counting stars. They are looking for what happened when something went wrong, because they already know something goes wrong on some moves. A profile with no negative reviews reads as filtered. A profile with three negative reviews and three calm, specific, non-defensive replies reads as a company that handles problems.

Two rules for the reply. Do not relitigate the facts in public, because you will lose in front of an audience even when you are right. And do not offer compensation in the reply, because it reads as buying the review down and sits uncomfortably close to the incentive rules.

The template that makes it worse, and what to write instead, is in responding to a bad review.

Who owns the sending?

Somebody named, or it stops within two months.

The most common failure we see is not policy and not wording. It is that the person who used to send the requests left, or got busy in June, and nobody noticed for a quarter because nothing breaks visibly when reviews stop arriving.

Attach the send to an event that already happens, usually the invoice being marked paid, and give one person the job with a named backup. The systems version of that argument is in building a review system that survives a staff change, and it matters more in a seasonal business than a steady one, because the season is exactly when the person who owns it has the least time.

Does any of this actually move rankings?

Velocity and recency do more than count does, and none of it substitutes for the rest.

A profile that has collected reviews steadily reads differently to both a customer and a ranking system than one that collected thirty in a burst and nothing since. What the evidence supports and what it does not, including what a review count is and is not worth, is in review velocity as a local ranking factor.

What reviews will not do is fix a profile that is missing its categories and service area, or a season that started in June. That side is in moving season is sixty days wide.

And do not gate. Beyond being prohibited, it produces a rating that reflects your selection rather than your business, which is not the number you want a customer to be reading. Both halves of that argument are in review gating is not allowed and also makes you rank worse.

What does the profile need beyond the reviews themselves?

Photographs that prove the reviews describe a real company.

A profile with thirty good reviews and four photographs from 2019 is telling two stories. The customer resolves the conflict by trusting the older signal, because photographs feel like evidence and text feels like opinion.

Put up this season's trucks, the crew in branded shirts, the inside of a clean truck with pads and straps, and one photograph of the yard. None of that is a ranking exercise. It is corroboration for the thing the reviews are claiming, and it costs one afternoon with a phone.

Answer the questions in the profile's own question section too. If nobody has asked any, ask and answer the five you get on every call: do you do stairs, do you disassemble beds, are you insured, do you take cards, how far ahead should we book. An unanswered question section is a place where a competitor or a stranger gets to speak for you.

Where these numbers come from

There are no statistics in this article. We could not read a primary source for what share of movers are chosen on reviews, what a review is worth in bookings, or an optimal send time, and this topic is full of numbers that trace back to vendor marketing. Where this article gives timing, it is our recommendation from operating these systems and it is labeled as that.

Google's prohibited and restricted content policy supplies the solicitation rules, the on-premises sentence and the staff-direction examples. Google's tips to get more reviews supplies the incentive label and the review link mechanism. Both read 2026-09-07.

The federal material is from the text of 16 CFR Part 465 rather than a summary of it: sections 465.2(d), 465.4, 465.5 and 465.7. Read 2026-09-07.