How to Get Facebook Reviews: Your Review Link and a Public Ask

Most guides on how to get Facebook reviews skip the detail that decides whether a review counts at all. A customer who recommends you and shares it with Friends has done you a favor your rating will never see.

This guide covers the four steps that matter: switching Recommendations on, finding the review link Meta never hands you, asking in a way that gets a public post, and the two rulebooks that decide what you can and cannot do while asking. It expands the Facebook section of our guide to responding to reviews on every platform.

Why "Public" Is the Whole Game

Facebook retired star ratings in 2018. A customer now answers one question, do you recommend this business, and picks who can see the answer. That second choice is the one most owners never mention when they ask, and it is the one that decides whether the review does anything.

Meta's help page on how the rating is determined is unusually direct about it:

"Only recommendations that are shared publicly are included in a Page's overall rating."

The same page explains why your own count can look different from a customer's: "When the Page admin switches into the Page, the review count that they see is of the number of public reviews, which are the only reviews that help calculate the recommendation score. Public reviews have a globe icon next to the date the review was posted."

Two more rules from that page shape everything below. A Page "may not have a rating if it hasn't received at least 5 reviews," and Meta does "not verify that users purchased the product or used the service they are reviewing." We broke down the rating math in Facebook Recommendations explained. Here, the practical takeaway is one sentence you will repeat in every ask: please share it as Public.

Step 1: Turn Recommendations On

Nobody can recommend a Page that has the feature off, and a surprising number of Pages do. These are Meta's current steps from Turn Recommendations on or off for your business Page:

1. Log into Facebook, then click your profile photo in the top right.
2. Click See all profiles, then select the Page you want to switch into.
3. Click your Page's profile photo in the top right.
4. Click Settings & privacy, then click Settings.
5. Click Page and tagging.
6. Toggle Allow others to view and leave reviews on your Page? on.

Meta describes what the switch does in plain terms: turning it on "lets anyone logged into Facebook publish a Recommendation on your Page, see your Page's rating and see Recommendations and reviews shared with Public." It adds a reason to bother that most owners miss: Recommendations "may make your Page easier to find in Facebook search."

One note from the same page saves a support ticket. "If your Page previously had reviews, Recommendations have been automatically turned on for your Page." So an older Page is probably already on. A Page created recently may not be, and if customers say they cannot find where to review you, this toggle is the first thing to check.

Step 2: Find Your Facebook Review Link

Google gives every business a short review link. Facebook does not. Meta publishes no review-link generator and no official link format, which is why the same question fills forums every month. The answer is your Reviews tab's own address.

1. Open your Page in a desktop browser while switched into it.
2. Click Reviews below the cover photo. Meta's help pages note you "may need to select More first."
3. Copy the address bar. It is your Page's address with /reviews on the end, so a Page at facebook.com/yourbusiness has its review link at facebook.com/yourbusiness/reviews.

We tested the format before writing this. The link for a well-known New York deli, opened by a visitor who is not logged in, lands on the Reviews tab, shows "98% recommend" with the review count beside it, and lists the newest recommendations above a login prompt. The link for a large coffee chain's Page at the same address returned "This Page Isn't Available," which is what you get when a Page has no Reviews tab to land on.

So test your link three ways before it goes on a card: in a desktop browser, in a phone browser, and tapped from a text message on a phone that has the Facebook app installed. If any of those fail, the usual culprits are Recommendations being switched off or a Page username that changed. Your username lives in your Page settings, and changing it changes the link.

Step 3: What the Customer Sees When They Click

Knowing the customer's six taps makes your ask more specific, and specific asks get done. These are Meta's steps from Recommend a business on Facebook:

1. Go to the Page of the business you want to recommend by clicking its name in your Feed or searching for it.
2. Click Reviews.
3. Click Yes to recommend the Page or No to not recommend it.
4. Select the audience for your review.
5. Write a recommendation.
6. Click Post.

Step 4 is the audience picker, and it is a separate tap that many customers leave at whatever Facebook last remembered. Meta also says the reviewer can change the audience after posting by opening the menu on the post "and then selecting Edit privacy." A customer who shared with Friends can fix it in ten seconds if you ask nicely.

One more line from that page is worth quoting to customers who ask why it matters: "When you write a review and share it publicly, your review, name and profile photo may appear alongside ads for that business." Some people will love that. Some will choose Friends because of it, and that is their call.

Meta's page also lists what a recommendation should be, and these are the rules you are implicitly asking a customer to follow: "Focus on the product or service offered by the business. Base it on personal experience. You should not leave a recommendation for a business if you help manage its Page."

Step 4: Ask in a Way That Gets a Public Post

The ask itself is the same one that works on Google: soon after the visit, one person at a time, with the link in hand, and nothing attached. The Facebook twist is the single word "public." Three scripts, one per channel:

In person, at the end of a good visit: "If you're on Facebook, we'd love a recommendation on our Page. The one thing that helps is setting it to Public, otherwise only your friends see it."

By text, the next day: "Thanks for coming in yesterday, Maria. If you have a minute, a recommendation on our Facebook Page helps us a lot: facebook.com/yourbusiness/reviews. Setting it to Public is what makes it count."

By email, in a thank-you note: "We'd be grateful for a recommendation on our Facebook Page. When you post it, choose Public as the audience so new customers can see it too. Here is the link."

Timing and tone are covered in depth for Google and apply here unchanged: the text message templates and email templates swap in without edits, and the guide to getting more Google reviews covers the trigger moments. Two Facebook-specific notes:

• Ask on Facebook itself sparingly. A Page post that says "please recommend us" reaches the followers who already like you, which is fine once a quarter. Weekly, it reads as begging and the algorithm rarely shows it anyway.
• Reply to every recommendation as the Page. The reply is public and the next visitor reads it. The free Facebook response generator drafts one in seconds in Facebook's conversational register, and how to respond to Facebook reviews covers the setup and the negative ones.

Three Things Facebook Calls "Recommendations"

Search for how to get Facebook recommendations and the top results are about something else entirely. Three features share the name, and asking for the wrong one wastes everyone's time.

Page Recommendations are the reviews on your business Page. This whole guide is about them.

"Ask for recommendations" posts are a consumer feature. A person writes a post asking their friends for a plumber or a dentist, and friends reply in the comments with business names. You cannot create these for your business, but you can earn a mention in them. Meta's own help page says a person "can also recommend a business by commenting on a friend's post asking for recommendations or sharing a Page with friends," and that is where a lot of real word of mouth happens. Being easy to find and tag is the only lever you have.

Algorithmic recommendations are Meta's "Pages You May Like" and "Suggested For You" suggestions, described on About recommendations on Facebook. Meta says it generally does not recommend Pages that "repeatedly engaged in misleading practices to build followings, such as purchasing 'likes'." Buying engagement to look popular can cost you the distribution you were trying to buy.

There is also a fourth, separate system called business reviews, which Meta says are "only available on the Facebook app for iPhone and Android" and are tied to purchases made after seeing an ad. You do not ask for those; Meta collects them inside the ad experience. If you run ads, they are worth knowing about.

What Meta and the FTC Do Not Allow While You Ask

Some popular guides to getting Facebook reviews open with "ask immediate family members," then "ask current employees," then "call in a favor with your favorite vendors." Read Meta's rules and the US rule on reviews before following any of that.

Meta's rules. The recommend-a-business page says a recommendation should be based on personal experience and that "You should not leave a recommendation for a business if you help manage its Page." Meta's Community Standards on spam prohibit "offering to provide anything of monetary value in exchange for engagement" and "attempting to or successfully selling, buying, or exchanging for engagement, such as likes, shares, views." Recommendations that break the rules "may be removed," and Meta notes that when spam reviews are removed, "the rating of a Page may change."

The FTC rule. In the US, the Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials has a section on insider reviews, 16 CFR 465.5. It makes it a violation for an officer or manager "to solicit or demand a consumer review about the business ... from any of their immediate relatives or from any employee or agent of the business" when the review then appears without a disclosure of the relationship and the manager did not instruct the reviewer to disclose it. The rule's definition of a consumer review covers any evaluation "published to a website or platform dedicated in whole or in part to receiving and displaying such evaluations," which includes a Facebook Page's Reviews tab.

The same rule's section on incentives bans rewards conditioned on a review "expressing a particular sentiment." We went through every rulebook in incentivized reviews: what is legal and what Google allows, and the Facebook answer is the same as the Google answer. Ask everyone, attach nothing, and never pick who gets asked based on how happy they looked; that selective approach is review gating, and it fails on every platform.

Where Facebook Fits Next to Google

Facebook recommendations are strongest among people who already know you. Google reviews are where strangers decide. For most local businesses the order of effort is Google first, then Facebook, then whichever industry site your customers actually read, which we ranked in best review sites by industry.

Facebook has no open review API, so no tool can reliably monitor or post replies there, and we do not pretend to. Our free generators write the reply for Facebook, Yelp, Trustpilot and TripAdvisor; you paste it in yourself. Google is different: an official API makes the loop dependable, so ReplyOnTheFly watches your Google reviews 24/7, writes a reply in your voice, and emails it to you for one-tap approval. Create a free account and the Google half runs itself while you spend your Facebook minute on the recommendations that come in.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Bottom Line

Getting Facebook reviews is four small jobs: the toggle, the link, the ask, and the reply. The ask is where most of the leverage sits, and the lever is one word.

Key Takeaways:

• Only public recommendations count toward your rating or show to strangers. Say the word every time you ask, and check for the globe icon on your Reviews tab.
• Your review link is your Reviews tab's address, ending in /reviews. Meta publishes no generator, so copy it from the address bar and test it on a phone.
• A rating appears at 5 reviews. Get there with customers, not staff or relatives: Meta says managers should not review their own Page, and the FTC's insider-review rule covers undisclosed reviews from employees and family.
• Nothing of value for a review, on Facebook or anywhere. Meta's spam rules and the FTC's incentive rule both say so.
• Put your systematic effort into Google, where strangers decide, and spend a minute on each Facebook recommendation as it arrives.

For the rest of the multi-platform playbook, head back to responding to reviews on every platform.

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