Is buying Google reviews ethical?

Strip away the marketing language and buying reviews is paying to tell customers a lie in the one place they went looking for the truth. The Competition and Markets Authority has estimated that online reviews influence around £23 billion of UK consumer spending each year. People book boilers, roofs and electrics on the strength of star ratings, and a fabricated rating converts that trust directly into money obtained by deception.

The harm has two victims. The customer hires a business on evidence that does not exist, and carries the real-world consequences when the work matches the reality rather than the rating. And the honest competitor down the road, who spent years earning 150 genuine reviews, loses jobs to a number that was bought in an afternoon. Small local markets feel this acutely because a handful of positions in the map result carries most of the demand.

There is also a commons problem. Reviews work for every small business only while customers believe them. Every fake batch erodes that belief, and the sector that suffers most from a trust collapse is exactly the one buying the fakes: small local businesses with no national brand to fall back on, whose reviews are their only public evidence.

This is why the ethics and the law now point the same way. Parliament put fake reviews on the banned-practices blacklist in 2025 precisely because the market harm is real and measurable, and Google's CMA undertakings exist because the platform's credibility depends on policing it.

The honest version costs effort instead of money and pays compound interest: do good work, ask everyone, make it effortless, absorb the occasional rough review as the price of credibility. A rating earned that way is an asset no sweep, sanction or scandal can take off you.