Showing reviews on your website within the law

What changed in April 2025

The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 overhauled UK consumer protection law. Its rules on fake reviews took effect on 6 April 2025, and the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it would focus on supporting compliance for the first three months before moving to enforcement.^[1]

The Act lists certain commercial practices as always unfair, regardless of their effect on a particular customer. Several of those relate directly to reviews. Breaches are not criminal offences, but the CMA can decide a breach has occurred without going to court and can impose penalties of up to 10 per cent of a business's annual global turnover.^[1]

The banned practices, in plain terms

Source: CMS summary of the Act's review provisions.^[1] The practical effect for a plumbing firm is that the review section of your website is now regulated content, not marketing copy you can edit freely.

What the CMA has done so far

After the initial compliance period, the CMA reviewed more than 100 businesses' websites to see whether they had published policies prohibiting fake reviews and explaining their approach to incentivised reviews. It found that 54 of them could be failing to comply, either because they had no such policy or because their policies were unclear, incomplete or hard to find. It wrote to those firms asking them to put clear, accessible measures in place and explain what they were changing.^[2]

The message applies to businesses of every size. If you display reviews, the CMA expects you to have thought about how they are collected and shown.

Publishing reviews on your own site

When you show reviews on your website, you are acting as a publisher of consumer reviews. The guidance summarised by CMS says publishers should take reasonable and proportionate steps to prevent and remove banned reviews and misleading review information, and lists measures such as published prevention and removal policies, risk assessment, detection, investigation and removal.^[1]

For a small plumbing firm, "reasonable and proportionate" is modest. It does not mean buying moderation software. It does mean being able to explain where each review came from and why you chose to display it the way you did.

A simple, defensible approach looks like this:

1. Show reviews from an independent platform, such as your Google Business Profile or a trade review site, and link to the full profile so customers can see every review, good and bad.
2. If you show a selection, say so and explain how it was chosen, for example "the five most recent reviews" rather than "our best reviews". Choose a rule that does not depend on the star rating.
3. Show dates so customers can see the reviews are current.
4. Never edit review text beyond trimming for length, and mark any trimming.
5. Publish a short reviews policy on the site, covering where reviews come from, how you choose which to show and that you do not pay for or write reviews.

Average ratings and star counts

If your site displays an overall rating, such as "4.8 from 120 reviews", it must be accurate and current, and it should be clear where it comes from. An average built only from reviews you picked is misleading presentation. Link the figure to the platform it came from and update it regularly, or leave it out. The same applies to any review markup in your site's code: it should match reviews that users can actually see on the page.

Asking customers for reviews

Asking satisfied customers for a review is fine. Asking every customer, rather than only the ones you expect to be happy, is the fairest approach and avoids any suggestion of filtering. Practical ways to do it:

• Send a short message after the job with a direct link to your review profile.
• Print a QR code linking to the profile on invoices or job sheets.
• Mention it in person at the end of a job, without pressure.

Be careful with incentives. Offering a discount, gift or prize draw entry in exchange for a review creates an incentivised review. Under the Act such reviews must be clearly labelled, and many platforms ban incentives entirely in their own terms. The simplest course for a small firm is not to offer incentives at all.

Testimonials and quotes

Some plumbing sites show testimonials collected directly, such as a card or email from a customer. These are reviews too. Keep the original, get the customer's permission to publish, use their real first name and town only if they agree, and never invent or embellish them. If you cannot trace a testimonial back to a real customer, remove it.

This is also where web designers sometimes cut corners, filling a new site with placeholder testimonials "until real ones come in". That is a fake review. A launch page with no testimonials is better than one with invented ones.

Responding to negative reviews

You cannot remove genuine negative reviews from your website display to make the picture look better. You can respond to them, on the platform where they were posted, calmly and factually. A considered reply to a fair complaint often reassures future customers more than a wall of five-star ratings.

If you believe a review is fake, for example from someone who was never a customer, report it to the platform using its own process rather than arguing in public.

A sample reviews policy

This is a starting point you can adapt. Check it reflects what you actually do.

Checklist

• Every review on the site came from a real customer and can be traced.
• Reviews link to the independent platform where they were posted.
• Any selection rule is stated and does not depend on star rating.
• Ratings and counts are accurate, dated and sourced.
• No incentives, or any incentivised reviews are clearly labelled.
• A short reviews policy is published and easy to find.

Reviews sit alongside credentials as the strongest trust signals on a plumbing website. The Gas Safe guide covers the other half of that picture.