No. It is part of the $1,000 a month engagement, along with local SEO, Google Business Profile management, content, and technical work. There is no add-on pricing, no per-location charge, and no review-platform license. The engagement is month to month with no contract.

Yes, and you should. Asking is permitted by both the FTC rule and Google's policies. What is prohibited is offering anything of value in exchange — payment, a discount, a free service, a raffle entry — and asking only the customers you expect to be happy. Ask everyone, ask the same way, and keep no record of who you think will say what.

Gating is a two-step funnel: first a private question asking how the experience went, then the public review link shown only to the customers who answer positively. Unhappy customers get routed to a private feedback form instead. Vendors still sell it as "reputation protection." It suppresses honest negative reviews and misrepresents overall sentiment, which is what the FTC rule's review suppression section addresses. I will not build it, and if you have one running I will ask you to turn it off before I take the engagement.

Three, roughly. Respond publicly, which is nearly always the right first move and the only one fully under your control. Report it, if it breaks a platform content policy — fake engagement, a personal attack, off-topic content, or a reviewer who was never a customer; the step-by-step process inside Google Business Profile is covered on the Google Business Profile page. Or pursue it legally, if the review states a false fact rather than an opinion, which is a lawyer's question and not mine. A truthful negative review, however unfair it feels, is not removable, and paying someone to make it disappear is itself a violation.

It depends almost entirely on your volume. A business with 40 reviews at a 3.6 average needs roughly 30 new five-star reviews to reach 4.3, which is three to six months of consistent asking for most service businesses. A business with 400 reviews moves much more slowly, because the denominator is large. Recency helps you in the meantime: the reviews a customer actually reads are the recent ones, so a steady flow of new five-star reviews changes the impression well before the headline number catches up.

Yes to new ones, and yes to the backlog if it is reachable. Responses are permanent, public, and read by people deciding whether to call you. A profile with 90% of reviews answered reads differently than one where only the angry ones got a reply — answering only complaints makes the complaints look like the important part. I work backward through the backlog in batches rather than all at once, so the response dates do not all land on the same day.

It varies by industry more than most guides admit. For home services: Angi, Yelp, Nextdoor, and the BBB, plus Facebook recommendations, which still drive real calls in Tucson neighborhoods. For dental and medical: Healthgrades, Zocdoc, and Vitals, where reviews are read by people who have already decided to switch providers. For restaurants and retail: Yelp and TripAdvisor. For everyone: Apple Business Connect and Bing Places, because nobody claims them and they show up in a brand search. The audit tells you which four matter for you, and we ignore the rest.

Partly, and the honest answer is that "partly" is usually enough. You control your website, your Google profile, and your social accounts — typically most of the visible area of that first screen. You cannot remove a third-party page you do not own. What you can do is make the assets you own strong and numerous enough that the unhelpful result moves below where people stop looking. That work is measured in months, not days.

Almost never, and anyone promising otherwise is selling you something. Legitimate news outlets do not remove accurate reporting, and complaint sites are structurally built to resist removal requests, with some of them monetizing the request itself. Legal demand letters to these sites frequently make the situation worse by generating a second page about the demand. The workable approach is suppression through owned assets, plus a page on your own site that addresses the underlying issue directly, which often outranks the complaint for the same query.

They appear to, though nobody outside those companies can say exactly how much weight reviews carry. Practically, the systems answering "who is a good plumber in Tucson" draw on the same public sources a person would — your profile, your reviews, and the pages that describe your services — so review volume, recency, and the specific language customers use in them all feed the same pool. What this changes about the work: almost nothing. A profile with a high volume of recent, specific, answered reviews is the goal either way.