Businesses spend a lot of energy perfecting the wording of their review request and almost none on when it's sent. That's backwards. A mediocre request at the right moment beats a beautifully written one sent three weeks later.

The principle: ask at the peak

Every customer experience has a high point — the moment they feel best about you. It's rarely the moment of payment, and it's almost never a week later.

Restaurant: when they say the meal was lovely, not when the bill arrives
Salon: the mirror moment at the end, not at the till
Trades: when you walk them round the finished work
Clinic: when the treatment has worked, which may be a week later
Hotel: at checkout if the stay went well, not mid-stay
Retail: after they've used the thing, not at purchase

The tell is verbal. When a customer volunteers something positive — "that was great," "you've saved us," "I love it" — that is the peak, and it is the single best moment to ask.

"That's really kind, thank you. If you wouldn't mind saying that in a Google review it would help us enormously — I'll text you the link."

Ask in person, deliver by phone

Here's the combination that works better than either half alone, and it resolves a real tension.

The verbal ask has to happen at the peak, face to face, from the person who served them. That's what creates the obligation.

The actual review should be written later, at home. Not on your tablet, not on your Wi-Fi. Several reviews from the same network in a short window is one of the strongest triggers for Google's spam filtering — the reviews appear and then quietly vanish weeks later. This is a very common cause of reviews not showing up.

So: ask in person, then send the link by text a few hours later. Best of both.

How long afterwards?

The right delay depends on when the customer can actually judge the result.

Same day, 2-4 hours later: restaurants, cafés, bars, salons, retail. The experience is complete and still vivid.
Next day: hotels (after they're home), most trades, garages, professional appointments.
3-7 days: anything where the result takes time to show — treatments, installations, products that need using.
2-4 weeks: longer-term services, ongoing work, and anything where the customer's real judgement forms slowly.

Past about four weeks, response rates fall off sharply. People aren't refusing — they've simply stopped thinking about you.

Time of day

Less important than the delay, but worth getting roughly right. Requests landing in the evening — after work, before bed — tend to do better than mid-morning ones, because writing a review is a spare-moment activity.

Avoid sending anything before 9am or after 9pm. A text message at 7am is a bad first impression regardless of what it says.

When not to ask at all

Skip the request entirely when:

Anything went wrong, even if you fixed it. Ask later, separately, once they've had a good experience — the one exception is the specific case in turning a bad review around.
They seemed rushed or indifferent. Asking a neutral customer often produces a neutral review, and 3-star reviews drag your average.
They've already reviewed you. Check first.
It's a sensitive service where public association could embarrass them. Some customers won't want their name attached at all.

Important distinction: skipping people who had a bad time is not the same as review gating. Gating means routing unhappy customers to a private form to stop them reviewing publicly — that's a policy violation. Simply not asking someone whose day you ruined is judgement, not filtering. Never build a system that screens people by sentiment before showing them the link.

Consistency beats campaigns

The single biggest timing mistake isn't the delay. It's doing it in bursts.

A business that emails 300 past customers in one afternoon gets a spike of reviews, most of which get filtered, followed by six months of silence. A business that asks every customer, every day, gets a steady flow that never looks suspicious and never stops.

Steady wins on every measure: it looks natural to Google, it keeps your newest reviews recent, and it compounds. Build the ask into the job — the closing handover, the invoice email, the automated text — rather than treating it as a marketing push.

The wording for each moment is in 12 review request templates.

And reply to every review that arrives — reviewers who get a response are far more likely to review you again after their next visit. Reploi does that part automatically. Start free — 5 replies/month →

The Best Time to Ask for a Google Review (Timing Beats Wording)