The FTC rule on consumer reviews (16 CFR Part 465)
The rule
In force since October 21, 2024. Its sections are titled: Fake or false consumer reviews, consumer testimonials, or celebrity testimonials; Buying positive or negative consumer reviews; Insider consumer reviews and consumer testimonials; Company-controlled review websites or entities; Review suppression; and Misuse of fake indicators of social media influence. It bars incentives “conditioned expressly or by implication on” a review “expressing a particular sentiment, whether positive or negative,” and misrepresenting that the reviews shown “represent most or all the reviews submitted” when reviews are suppressed “based upon their ratings or their negative sentiment.” The FTC’s announcement names “AI-generated fake reviews” among the reviews the rule addresses.
What Grades.com does
- Your review page shows every site you list to every visitor. There is no rating-first step and no routing by how happy someone is.
- Reviews on Grades.com, in public mode, are published whatever their rating. If you choose which ones to feature, each one is labelled "Selected by the business" with a notice, and featured reviews never count in your grade.
- The review form refuses your own team's email addresses and takes one review per address every 90 days.
- A review that disappears from its site stays in your Review Archive.
Your part
Don't offer anything for a review, don't write or buy reviews, and make sure staff or family who review you say so. Don't threaten or pressure reviewers.
Source: 16 CFR Part 465 and the FTC announcement of August 14, 2024, read October 30, 2026.
Testimonials in your marketing (FTC Endorsement Guides)
The rule
The Endorsement Guides say endorsements “must reflect the honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experience of the endorser,” and that an endorsement “may not be presented out of context or reworded so as to distort in any way the endorser's opinion or experience.” An ad with consumers’ experience of a key attribute “will likely be interpreted as representing that the endorser's experience is representative of what consumers will generally achieve.”
What Grades.com does
- The Review Showcase and website widgets show reviews word for word. A review longer than your limit is left out, never cut.
- Our Terms let a business share a video review left on Grades.com only when the reviewer ticked a separate, optional sharing box, and never edited to change what it says.
Your part
Don't present a handful of reviews as typical when they are not. In healthcare, the HIPAA Privacy Rule says a covered entity “must obtain an authorization for any use or disclosure of protected health information for marketing” (45 CFR 164.508(a)(3)); ask your lawyer whether that applies to a patient's review you want to use.
Source: 16 CFR Part 255, read October 30, 2026.
Review requests by email: the CAN-SPAM Act
The rule
The FTC's compliance guide lists the main requirements for commercial email: “Don't use false or misleading header information,” “Don't use deceptive subject lines,” “Identify the message as an ad,” “Tell recipients where you're located,” “Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future marketing email from you,” “Honor opt-out requests promptly” (within 10 business days) and “Monitor what others are doing on your behalf.” A message with only transactional or relationship content is, in the guide's words, “otherwise exempt from most provisions of the CAN-SPAM Act.”
What Grades.com does
- Every request names your business and its postal address. A business without an address cannot send email requests.
- An unsubscribe link and one-click unsubscribe. Opt-outs take effect at once and are never deleted; a spam complaint can be undone only by the customer.
- A spam complaint or hard bounce for any business stops requests to that address from every business on Grades.com.
- Messages go out between 9am and 8pm in the customer's time zone, at most one a day per address. A customer gets one request every 30 days (you can set 14 to 90), and a customer who already left a review is not asked again.
Your part
Add only real customers whose addresses you collected lawfully. If you write to people in Canada or Europe, their own laws apply too.
Source: FTC, CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business, read October 30, 2026.
Review requests by text: the TCPA
Coming soon
The rule
FCC rules require “the prior express written consent of the called party” for a call that “includes or introduces an advertisement or constitutes telemarketing” made with an autodialer or a prerecorded voice to a mobile number, and bar telephone solicitations “before the hour of 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. (local time at the called party's location).” The FCC has said that “text messages are calls under the TCPA.” Under the rule in force today, replying “stop,” “quit,” “end,” “revoke,” “opt out,” “cancel” or “unsubscribe” to a text “constitutes a reasonable means per se to revoke consent,” and a revocation must be honored “within a reasonable time not to exceed ten business days”; an FCC change to this rule takes effect November 25, 2026. Some states set shorter calling hours (see State laws below).
What Grades.com does
- No text without a consent record: the exact wording the customer agreed to, where they agreed and when.
- Texts go out between 9am and 8pm in the customer's time zone; with no time zone known, only when it is 8am to 8pm everywhere in the contiguous US.
- STOP, START and HELP replies are handled automatically. A STOP can be undone only by the customer.
- Changing a contact's phone number clears the consent recorded for the old one.
Text campaigns are coming soon; these rules are already built in.
Your part
Collect consent with clear wording before you add a phone number for texts, and keep proof of it.
Source: 47 CFR 64.1200, the FCC order of January 26, 2024 and the FCC rule of October 26, 2026, read October 30, 2026.
