“Your reviews” is a figure of speech. It is a comfortable one, and it is worth taking apart before you build anything important on top of it, because the answer to who owns them shapes what you can display, what you can move, and how easily you can change your mind later.
There is one idea underneath all of this and it is worth stating plainly at the start. Credibility and control pull in opposite directions. The reviews that carry the most weight with a buyer are exactly the ones you have the least ability to move, reuse, or keep. Every decision below is a trade on that one axis.
A note before going further: this covers the shape of the rules as they stand, not legal advice. Where a decision matters commercially, take proper advice on your own circumstances.
Service reviews and product reviews are different things
These get lumped together and they answer different questions.
A service review is about you. Were they easy to deal with, did it arrive, what happened when something went wrong. It reassures across your whole site and it feeds how you appear in local search. Google reviews are service reviews, and so is most of what sits on Trustpilot.
A product review is about one item. Is this the right thing for me, does it do what it claims, how does it compare to the one I tried before. It only helps on the page it belongs to, and it is the kind that can still earn you star ratings in search results.
They are not interchangeable, which catches out businesses who have worked hard on one and assume it covers the other. Five hundred glowing service reviews are worth a great deal, and they do nothing at all for a product page with no proof on it. If you sell things, you need both.
Who actually owns the words
The reviewer does. They wrote it, so the copyright is theirs, and it does not transfer to you because the review is about you or because you paid a platform to collect it.
What the reviewer does is grant the platform a licence, usually a broad one, when they agree to the terms. What you get, in turn, is whatever licence the platform’s terms grant you, which is generally permission to display reviews through the platform’s own tools in the ways the platform intends.
So there are three parties, and the business is the one furthest from the asset. That is not a scandal, it is simply the arrangement, and it explains most of what follows.
There is a second thread worth knowing about. A reviewer’s name, and whatever else the platform holds about them, is personal data. That does not stop you displaying a public review, but it does mean that bulk-moving a customer review database around is not a purely commercial decision, and it deserves a thought before you do it.
What you can take with you, and what you cannot
Most platforms will let you export your reviews. The file will contain the text, the rating, the date, and usually a name.
What no export contains is the thing that made the review persuasive. When a review sits on an independent platform, its weight comes from the fact that the platform verified it and that you could not have written it yourself. Copy that same sentence onto your own website as a quote and it becomes a testimonial, and it is worth what testimonials have always been worth, which is not nothing but is a great deal less.
You can take the words. You cannot take the credibility. That is the whole of the portability question, and it is why “we can export our data” is a weaker reassurance than it sounds when a platform’s salesperson offers it.
Importing helps less than you would hope, too. Where a platform accepts imported reviews at all, it will typically mark them as unverified, precisely because it did not see them arrive.
The lock-in nobody mentions until you try to leave
This is the part worth understanding before you sign anything, because the hooks are not obvious.
The largest one is not contractual at all. Since 2019, Google has not shown star ratings in search results for reviews a business collects about itself and displays on its own site. That applies whether you mark the reviews up yourself or embed a third-party widget to do it, and it covers business-level markup. The exception is products: reviews of a specific item can still earn stars.
The consequence is that for business-level reputation, the star ratings you actually want in a search result are not something you can produce yourself at all. Seller ratings come through Google’s licensed review partners. So the paid platforms are not really selling you the reviews. They are selling you placements you cannot self-serve, and that is the real hook.
The smaller hooks are the ordinary ones. Widgets stop working when a subscription lapses, so a site that displays reviews through a platform’s embed gets holes in it. The public profile on the platform generally stays where it is, since it is their site rather than yours, which means your reviews continue to exist somewhere you no longer control.
None of this is a reason to avoid paid platforms. It is a reason to know what you are buying, which is ongoing access rather than an asset.
What the law now says about displaying them
This changed recently and it changed in a direction that rewards behaving well.
Under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, provisions on reviews came into force on 6 April 2025. Three things are now banned. Two of them are obvious enough: writing or commissioning fake reviews, and hiding the fact that a review was paid for or incentivised.
The third is the one that matters to anybody designing a product page. You must not present reviews in a misleading way, and that covers the figures you draw from them as well as the reviews themselves. Your average star rating counts, in other words, not just the words underneath it.
The Competition and Markets Authority can impose fines of up to 10% of global turnover, and because these are blacklisted practices it does not have to demonstrate that any particular consumer was actually influenced.
In practice this draws a clear line through something a lot of shops do casually. Choosing a handful of genuine reviews to feature near your buy button is presentation, and it is fine. Filtering the page so the negative ones are not shown, or building an average out of only the good ones, is now a specific legal risk rather than merely poor form. If you feature a selection, the full set has to remain available and the score has to reflect all of it.
The same logic applies to soliciting them. Asking every customer is fine. Asking only the customers you expect to be happy is the same problem wearing a different hat.
Incentives, and asking without crossing a line
You may offer an incentive for a review. What you may not do is hide that you did, or make the incentive conditional on the review being positive.
So a prize draw for anybody who reviews is acceptable provided the review carries a clear note that it was incentivised. A discount code for five star reviews is not, and it is exactly the sort of thing that produces a body of reviews nobody can trust and which you cannot then rely on.
Most platforms handle the disclosure automatically if you use their invitation flow, which is a decent argument for using it rather than emailing customers yourself.
Replying without giving away private details
A public reply is public, including to people who are not your customer.
Businesses regularly reply to a critical review with something like “we did refund your order on the 14th and delivered to the address you gave us in Hatfield”, which settles the argument and discloses that person’s purchase history and rough location to the internet. That is a data protection problem of your own making, on a page you control.
Reply in public with the general position and no specifics, and move anything that needs details into private correspondence. It reads better too, because the calm, unspecific reply looks far more assured than the point-by-point rebuttal.
How I would actually set this up
Google reviews are the odd one out and deserve to be the backbone. They cost nothing, they appear where people are already looking, and they attach to a Business Profile you own rather than to a subscription. Guard access to that profile carefully, because that is the one way you can genuinely lose them.
Add a paid platform when you need something Google cannot do, which is product-level reviews on individual pages, or seller ratings. Choose it knowing you are renting placement rather than buying an asset, and read what happens on termination before you start rather than after.
Then keep your own copy of everything from the beginning. Not because you can redisplay it as proof, but because the content is genuinely valuable to you as research, which is what the reviews you already have is about. That much really is yours to keep.
Where to start
Find out where your reviews currently live, who in your business can access each of those accounts, and what your contract says happens if you stop paying. Most businesses cannot answer all three, and the third one is usually the surprise.
Where these facts come from
The rules described above are not our interpretation, so here are the sources, in case you want to read them yourself or point somebody else at them.
- The legislation itself is the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (opens in a new tab).
- The Competition and Markets Authority’s fake reviews guidance (opens in a new tab), published 4 April 2025, is the plain-English explanation of what businesses publishing reviews are required to do.
- Google’s position on star ratings for reviews a business collects about itself is set out in making review rich results more helpful (opens in a new tab).