Google's contribution policy lists "merchants requesting that staff solicit a certain number of reviews" as a prohibited rating-manipulation practice, alongside "merchants requesting that staff solicit reviews that include specific content." Spearleaf is drawing attention to the language because it describes a workflow that has been standard in a great many chiropractic and healthcare offices for years.
The routine in question is familiar. A practice sets a target of a certain number of new reviews per month, assigns it to front-desk staff, and sometimes tracks who brought in how many. Occasionally the ask extends to content, with staff encouraged to steer patients toward mentioning a particular treatment or naming a particular provider. Both of those are described in the policy as prohibited.
A related clause covers the point of the ask. The policy states that when soliciting reviews, merchants should not require or pressure users to leave ratings or write reviews while on the premises. For a practice whose review process involves handing a patient a tablet at checkout, that is a direct point of contact with the rules.
What remains permitted is the part worth emphasising, because the policy is narrower than a blanket prohibition. Businesses may solicit or encourage content that represents a genuine experience, provided they do not offer incentives for it and do not attempt to influence the rating or the contents of the review. Asking every patient to share an honest experience is allowed. Setting a staff quota for how many of those arrive, or shaping what they say, is not. Spearleaf covers profile management at spearleaf.com/google-business-profile-optimization.
"Most practices doing this are not trying to game anything, which is exactly why it persists," said Joshua Albanese, owner of Spearleaf. "Somebody read that reviews matter, turned it into a number on a whiteboard, and nobody revisited it. The fix is not to stop asking patients for reviews. It is to stop managing it as a staff quota and to stop steering what the review says."
The enforcement context has changed alongside the policy language. Google reported blocking or removing more than 292 million policy-violating reviews in a single year in its 2025 trust and safety reporting, up from roughly 240 million the prior year, and also removed over 13 million fake business profiles and blocked 79 million inaccurate profile edits. The company has described detection systems that identify coordinated posting patterns and policy-violating content before publication rather than after.
For a practice, the practical exposure is that enforcement operates on patterns rather than on intent. A cluster of reviews arriving in a narrow window, from devices on the same network, with similar phrasing and similar length, resembles a coordinated campaign whether or not one was intended. A quota-driven push at the end of a month can produce exactly that shape, and the reviews that get removed in a sweep are frequently genuine ones that arrived in a suspicious pattern.
Spearleaf's recommendation to practices is to move review generation from a periodic push to a steady routine: ask consistently rather than in bursts, ask without a script, let patients write on their own devices and on their own time, and stop tracking it per staff member. It also suggests auditing what the practice currently instructs staff to do, since the instruction is often verbal and undocumented. The agency's related work is described at https://spearleaf.com/industries/chiropractor/seo/.
The upside of the correction is that a steady, unscripted review flow tends to read better to patients as well. Reviews that arrive in a natural cadence, in varied language and varied length, describe a practice more credibly than a batch of similar entries posted in the same week.
Chiropractic practices and other local businesses can review the agency's approach at spearleaf.com.
About Spearleaf Spearleaf is a local SEO and AI search optimization agency in Fort Myers, FL, founded by Joshua Albanese. The agency helps local service businesses rank in the Google Map Pack and earn citations from AI assistants including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude, through organic content, Google Business Profile optimization, reputation management, web design, and customer reactivation campaigns. Engagements run month to month after an initial term.
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For more information about Spearleaf, contact the company here:
Spearleaf
Joshua Albanese
(239) 920-7750
joshua@spearleaf.com
11000 Metro Pkwy #13, Fort Myers, FL 33966