Reviews are not a vanity metric

There is a version of review advice that is essentially fraud — buying them, incentivising them, writing them. Set that aside. It gets detected, it gets penalised, and it produces a rating that does not survive contact with a real customer.

The legitimate mechanics are duller and they work. Most people will leave a review if asked at the right moment, by a person, with a link that takes one tap. Almost nobody will go and find your profile unprompted unless they are angry.

The asymmetry

That last point is the whole problem. Unprompted reviews skew negative, because frustration is a much stronger motivator than satisfaction. A business that never asks does not get a neutral sample — it gets the complaints.

What to do about it

• Ask at the moment the work is finished and the customer is visibly happy, not a week later by email.
• Send a direct link to the review form, not to your profile. Every extra tap loses people.
• Reply to every review. Replies are read by the next customer far more than by the reviewer.
• Answer a bad review once, factually, without arguing. The audience is everyone reading it afterwards.

None of this is a campaign. It is a habit, attached to the end of a job.