The DMCC Act and Fake Reviews: What UK Small Businesses Must Know

Since 6 April 2025, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers (DMCC) Act 2024 has made fake reviews a banned practice for every business that sells to UK consumers. You can still ask customers for reviews. What you cannot do is write, buy or commission fake ones, hide that a review was incentivised, or present your reviews in a misleading way, for example by quietly removing the negative ones.

Schedule 20 of the Act lists commercial practices that are unfair in all circumstances. Paragraph 13 covers reviews, and the CMA's guidance (CMA208) explains it in three parts:

The ban also covers commissioning or helping someone else to do any of these, so paying an agency to "boost" your rating is caught even if you never type a review yourself.

Yes. The CMA's guidance says that encouraging customers to leave a review without predetermining its content or sentiment, for example by emailing customers generally to ask whether they would like to review you, is not prohibited. A Google Review Card, a counter stand or a link on your receipt all do exactly that: they open the review form and the customer decides what to write.

Under the DMCC Act, an incentivised review is only banned when the incentive is concealed. The CMA's guidance accepts that a trader may incentivise a review if the review is clearly labelled as incentivised and still reflects the customer's genuine experience.

Google's rules are stricter than the law. Google's policy treats offering anything in exchange for a review, including discounts, freebies or prize draws, as fake engagement and prohibits it outright. So for Google reviews, the practical answer is simple: no incentives at all, disclosed or not. Our article on whether review cards are allowed by Google sets out Google's side in more detail.

Selectively steering happy customers to Google and unhappy ones somewhere else is risky under both regimes. The CMA's guidance warns against selectively promoting positive reviews, interfering with people's ability to leave negative reviews, and arbitrarily stopping and starting review invitations. Google's policy separately prohibits selectively soliciting positive reviews. A review gating funnel that only sends four- and five-star customers to Google fails on both counts.

Not as if they were ordinary customers. A review from an employee or relative that presents itself as an independent customer experience is a fake review under the Act. Google's policy also prohibits reviews from people with a conflict of interest, such as owners and employees reviewing their own business.

In January 2025, after an investigation running since 2020, the CMA secured undertakings from Google. Google committed to sanction UK businesses that boost their ratings with fake reviews, including by placing warning alerts on their Business Profiles, and to sanction people who write fake reviews for UK businesses. In practice that means a business caught buying reviews risks a public warning on its profile, not just the removal of the reviews.

The DMCC Act gave the CMA power to enforce consumer law directly, without going to court first. For breaches it can impose fines of up to 10% of a business's global turnover, and it can also require businesses to compensate consumers or change how they operate. The CMA has said it is applying the rules to review publishers and traders, and has written to dozens of businesses about their review practices.

Getting the asking part right is mostly about routine. Our guide to asking customers for Google reviews naturally covers wording and timing that stay inside the rules.