How to Ask for a Google Review by Text: Templates and Examples

The best time to ask for a Google review by text is within a few hours of the job, purchase, or appointment finishing — while the experience is still fresh and before the customer's attention moves on. The text itself should be short, sound like a person wrote it, and make it as easy as possible to leave the review: one line of context, one direct link, done.

Below are five templates you can adapt, organized by the situation they fit. After that, a section on SMS consent that you should read before you text anyone.

What makes a review request text work

Before the templates, three things that separate a text customers act on from one they ignore or report as spam:

• It's short. One or two sentences. Nobody reads a paragraph in a text message.
• It names the specific thing. "Thanks for choosing us" is generic. "Thanks for having us out for the furnace repair" tells the customer you're not blasting a template to everyone (even though you are).
• It has one link and one ask. Don't ask for a review and also mention a referral discount and also remind them about maintenance plans. One text, one purpose.

Each template below has a placeholder — `[REVIEW_LINK]` — for your direct Google review link. If you don't have one set up yet, Google Business Profile lets you generate a short link that drops customers straight into the review box instead of your profile page.

Template 1: Service just completed at a home

For HVAC, plumbing, electrical, or any job where a technician was just at someone's house.

Hi [Name], this is [Company] — thanks for having us out today for the [service, e.g. "furnace repair"]. If you have a minute, we'd appreciate a quick Google review: [REVIEW_LINK]

Keep the technician or company name in there. Homeowners remember who was in their house more than they remember the company name on the invoice.

Template 2: Product delivered or purchase completed

For retail, e-commerce with local pickup, furniture, appliances, or anything where the "moment" is a completed sale or delivery.

Hi [Name], thanks for picking up your [item] from [Company] today. Hope it's exactly what you needed. If you have 30 seconds, a Google review helps other folks find us: [REVIEW_LINK]

This one leans on the product itself rather than a service interaction, which is the honest framing when there wasn't really a personal service moment to reference.

Template 3: Appointment just finished

For salons, dental offices, med spas, chiropractors, or any business built around scheduled appointments.

Hi [Name], it was great seeing you at [Company] today. If you were happy with your visit, a quick Google review would mean a lot to us: [REVIEW_LINK]

Notice the conditional phrasing — "if you were happy with your visit." That's not just politeness. It's a small but real safeguard against pushing an unhappy customer straight into a public review before you've had a chance to hear the complaint directly.

A note on that conditional phrasing

Google's policy prohibits review gating — routing only happy customers to a public review and diverting unhappy ones elsewhere. Don't build a filtering step around a phrase like this. Use it as tone, send it to everyone who had the appointment, and let people write what they're going to write.

Template 4: Repeat or returning customer

For a customer you've served more than once, where a first-timer template would sound off.

Hi [Name], thanks again for coming back to [Company] — always good to see you. If you haven't yet, a Google review from a repeat customer like you carries a lot of weight: [REVIEW_LINK]

Repeat customers who've never left a review are an underused source of new reviews. They already trust you; the ask is usually the only thing missing.

Template 5: General, all-purpose

For when the specifics above don't quite fit, or you want one template to cover several service types at once.

Hi [Name], thanks for choosing [Company]. If you have a minute, we'd really appreciate a Google review: [REVIEW_LINK]

Use this as a fallback, not a default. The more specific templates above will read as more genuine because they reference something real about the interaction.

Timing matters more than wording

Send the text within a few hours of the job, appointment, or purchase — same day if at all possible. Wait a week and the customer has to reconstruct the memory before they can write about it, which is exactly when requests start getting ignored or deleted.

None of these templates come with a guaranteed response rate, and be skeptical of anyone who tells you a specific percentage of customers will act on a text like this. What you're doing is removing friction and picking a good moment to ask — the rest depends on your service, your customer base, and plain timing.

SMS consent: not optional

This is the part that's easy to skip and expensive to get wrong. You generally need the customer's prior consent before you can text them a review request — this isn't a courtesy, it's a legal requirement in most jurisdictions, and the penalties for unwanted commercial texts can be significant.

In practice, that means:

• Only text numbers where you have consent for this kind of message. A phone number on an invoice or intake form isn't automatically consent to receive marketing or review-request texts — check what the customer actually agreed to when you collected it.
• Honor opt-outs immediately. If someone has texted STOP, asked not to be contacted, or opted out of any prior message, that applies here too. Don't re-add them to a review-request list later.
• Keep a record of consent. If you're collecting phone numbers specifically for review requests, say so at the point of collection ("we may text you a link to leave a review after your visit") and keep a record that the customer agreed.
• Don't buy or scrape phone lists for this. Review requests only work — and only stay legal — when they go to customers who actually did business with you and agreed to be texted.

If you're not confident your intake process already covers this, it's worth fixing before you send a single template above, not after.

Doing this at scale

Sending one text after one job is easy. Doing it consistently after every job, appointment, or sale — with the right template, the right timing, and proper consent tracking — is where most businesses fall behind, usually because nobody owns the task once things get busy.

That's the gap Fieldstone Review Growth is built for: it automates the sending (SMS and email), tracks consent and opt-outs, and adds monitoring and response management on top so reviews don't just get requested — they get watched and answered.

For the broader system these templates fit into — where to place the ask, how often to send it, and what else drives review growth beyond the text itself — see how to get more Google reviews for your local business.