How to Create a Google Review Link and QR Code

A Google review link is a short URL that opens the "Write a review" box for your business directly, so a customer goes from tapping a link to choosing a star rating in one step instead of searching for you on Maps, finding the right listing and hunting for the review button. The format is https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=YOUR_PLACE_ID, where the Place ID is the identifier Google gives your listing. Put that link in a text message, an email or a QR code, and every customer who wants to leave a review lands exactly where they need to be.

To create a Google review link, find your Place ID, drop it into that URL pattern, test it, and then turn it into a QR code for anything printed. The free Google Review Link Generator does the whole job from a normal Google Maps URL: it builds the direct link, generates the QR code and gives you share buttons for WhatsApp, Telegram, email and SMS. The rest of this guide covers each step in detail, where and when to ask, what Google's policies allow, and how to measure whether the rollout is working.

What a direct link to Google reviews actually does

Most businesses that ask for reviews make the customer do the work. "Find us on Google and leave a review" sounds like one instruction, but it is really five: open Maps, type the name, pick the right result out of several similarly named ones, scroll to the reviews section, and tap the button to write one. Every step loses people. Someone who would happily give you five stars in the moment will not spend two minutes searching, and if your name is close to another business, a few of them will review the wrong place.

A direct link removes all of that. Because the URL carries your Place ID, Google knows exactly which listing to open, and because it points at the review form rather than the listing page, the customer starts on the rating stars. On a phone where they are signed in to a Google account, it is tap, rate, type, post.

Two things the link does not do are worth knowing up front. It cannot pre-fill a rating or any text — it only opens the empty form, and the customer writes their own review. And it does not let you customise what the form says; any message you want to add ("Thanks for coming in today — we would love to hear how it went") goes in the SMS, email or card around the link.

How to create a Google review link, step by step

There are two routes. The quick one uses a tool that reads your Maps URL for you; the manual one builds the link by hand from your Place ID. Both end in the same URL.

1. Open your listing on Google Maps. Search for your business on Google Maps, click your listing so its details panel opens, and copy the URL from the browser's address bar.
2. Find your Place ID. Paste that URL into the free Place ID Finder. It returns the Place ID, the CID and the Google ID for the listing, with no signup. The Place ID is the one that begins with ChIJ.
3. Build the link. Add the Place ID to the end of https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=. Nothing else goes in the URL.
4. Test it on a phone. Open the link on a mobile device, signed in to a Google account, and confirm that it opens the review form for the right business — check the name and the address at the top.
5. Shorten it if you need to. The full link is long. For SMS and printed materials, a short link that redirects to it is easier to type and looks less intimidating, though for print the QR code usually does the job better.
6. Generate the QR code. Use the same link to create a QR code for receipts, counter cards and signage (covered below).

If you would rather skip steps two and three, paste the Maps URL into the review link generator instead. It builds the direct review URL from the Maps URL itself, and you can copy the result, share it from the page or turn it into a QR code straight away.

Why the Place ID matters

Google uses several identifiers for the same listing, and they are easy to confuse. The Place ID (ChIJ…) is the one the review link needs. The CID is a long number that appears in ?cid= Maps links, and the Google ID is a hexadecimal pair in the form 0x…:0x…. If you paste the wrong one into the review URL, the link opens an error or nothing at all. Our Place ID, CID and Google ID guide explains how the three relate and where each is used.

One practical note: Place IDs are built to be stable, and a review link keeps working for as long as your listing exists, but Google can occasionally update a listing's identifiers. It it costs nothing to open your own link every few months and confirm it still lands on the right form — especially before you print a large batch of anything.

How to make a Google review QR code

A Google review QR code is simply the review link encoded as a scannable image. A customer points their phone camera at it, taps the notification, and the review form opens. For anything physical — a till, a table, a takeaway bag — it beats a printed URL every time, because nobody types a sixty-character web address.

The review link generator creates the QR code alongside the link. It also lets you toggle what the QR code encodes: the direct review link, or your normal Maps listing link. Use the review link when the goal is reviews. Use the Maps link when you want people to see your listing first — your hours, photos and existing reviews — for example on a flyer aimed at new customers rather than a receipt aimed at existing ones.

Getting printed QR codes right

• Size. Keep the code large enough to scan from where people will actually stand. A code on a receipt is scanned from a hand's length away; a code on a window poster is scanned from a metre or more and needs to be much bigger.
• Quiet zone. Leave a clear white margin around the code. Designers like to crop it tight against other graphics, and that is the most common reason a code fails to scan.
• Contrast. Dark code on a light background. Brand colours are fine if the contrast stays strong; light-on-dark and low-contrast pastel codes scan unreliably.
• A line of text. A code on its own is ambiguous. "Scan to review us on Google — it takes 30 seconds" tells the customer what happens and how long it takes.
• Test the proof. Scan the printed proof with two or three different phones before signing off the full run.

Where to share your review link and QR code

The best place to put the link is wherever a customer already is when their experience ends. That differs by business type, so treat this as a menu rather than a checklist.

The review link generator includes share buttons for WhatsApp, Telegram, email and SMS, so for one-off requests you can send the link from the tool itself. For anything you send regularly, save the link in your messaging templates, booking system or CRM so it goes out the same way every time.

A message that works

Keep the request short, personal and specific to the visit. Something like: "Hi Sam, thanks for choosing us for your boiler service today. If you have a minute, a quick Google review helps other people in the area find us: [link]." Use their name, mention what you did, give the reason, and include the link once. Do not attach conditions or offer anything in return — more on that below.

When to ask for a review

Timing does more for your response rate than wording. The right moment is shortly after the customer has received the value — while the experience is fresh and before everyday life takes over.

• Services and appointments: the same day, ideally within a couple of hours of the job finishing or the appointment ending.
• Restaurants and cafés: at the table, through the QR code on the bill or table tent, or in a follow-up if the booking captured contact details.
• Online orders: after delivery, not after purchase. Asking someone to review a product they have not received produces either nothing or a complaint about shipping.
• Longer projects: at a natural milestone — handover, sign-off, the end of the first month — rather than at the final invoice, when the conversation is about money.

One reminder a few days later is reasonable if someone did not respond. More than that starts to feel like pressure, and it rarely changes the outcome.

Google's review policies: what you can and cannot do

Asking for reviews is allowed, and a direct link is simply a convenient way to do it. What Google's published policies for user-contributed content on Maps prohibit is anything that distorts what reviews say about a business. The rules that matter for a review link rollout are these:

• No incentives. Google's policy does not allow offering money, discounts, free products or other rewards in exchange for reviews — and that includes prize draws and "review us for 10% off" offers. The request has to stand on its own.
• No review gating. You should not ask only the customers you expect to be happy, or send people through a "how did we do?" screen that routes satisfied customers to Google and unhappy ones to a private form. Google's guidance is against selectively soliciting positive reviews; ask everyone, or ask a consistent group (every completed job, every order) rather than a hand-picked one.
• No reviews written for customers. Do not post reviews on a customer's behalf, write the text for them, or have staff review the business from their own accounts. Reviews must reflect the reviewer's own genuine experience.
• No reviews from people with a conflict of interest. Owners, employees and their families reviewing their own business — or a competitor's — fall outside the rules.

Breaking these rules risks reviews being removed and, in more serious cases, restrictions on the listing. Consumer protection rules in many countries also treat fake or incentivised reviews as misleading advertising, separately from Google's own policies. Check the current wording of Google's policies and the law where you operate; this is general information, not legal advice.

A clean, consistent process — the same link, sent to every customer at the same point, with no strings attached — is also the one that produces the most believable review profile. A business with 200 reviews averaging 4.6 looks more trustworthy than one with 40 reviews that are all five stars.

Rolling out review links across multiple locations

Every location has its own listing, its own Place ID and therefore its own review link. Mixing them up is the classic multi-location mistake: a QR code designed once at head office and printed for every branch sends every review to the flagship.

1. List every location with its Place ID. For a handful of branches, run each Maps URL through the Place ID Finder. For dozens or hundreds, a Google Maps Data Scraper pull of your brand returns a place_id column for every listing alongside its address, so you can build the full table in one pass.
2. Build one link per location. In a spreadsheet, concatenate the base URL and each Place ID. Keep the location name and address next to each link.
3. Generate and label the QR codes. Name every file with the branch name or store number, and print the branch name in small type next to the code so staff can spot a mismatch.
4. Test one code per branch before the materials ship, and again after installation.

Our guide to monitoring Google reviews across multiple locations covers what to do once the reviews start arriving at scale.

How to measure whether your review link is working

Rolling out a review link without measuring it means you will not know which channels work or whether the effort was worth it. You need three numbers per location, tracked over time: total review count, average rating, and the number of new reviews per week or month.

Set a baseline first

Before launch, record each listing's review count and rating. Say a café has 86 reviews averaging 4.3. If, eight weeks after adding QR codes to receipts and table tents, it has 131 reviews averaging 4.5, that is 45 new reviews against a previous pace of perhaps two or three a month. The number is illustrative, but the method is the point: without the baseline, you cannot tell a rollout effect from normal growth.

Track it automatically

Checking listings by hand works for one location and falls apart at five. The Google Reviews Monitoring service keeps a saved reviews job on a schedule: you add the places, or paste their Place IDs, set how often to re-scan, and new reviews arrive in your dashboard as full records — reviewer name, star rating, review text, date, owner replies and stable identifiers for the place and review. Because it uses the same 27-column schema as the one-off Google Maps Reviews Scraper, you can pull the back catalogue once to set your baseline and then let the monitor build the history from there. For a quick snapshot of review counts and ratings across many listings, the total_reviews and average_rating columns in a Maps pull do the same job.

Attribute by channel

Google does not tell you which review came from which link, so attribution is approximate. The simplest method is staggered rollout: switch on one channel at a time — SMS first, then receipts two weeks later — and watch whether the weekly review rate moves. With multiple branches, you can compare a branch that started using the link against one that has not yet.

Respond to what comes in

More reviews means more to respond to. Reply to negative reviews promptly and specifically, and acknowledge positive ones. Responses show future customers that someone is listening, and they turn the review stream into a feedback channel. Once you have a few hundred reviews, reading them for patterns pays off — our article on customer sentiment analysis using Google reviews shows how.

How this fits with the rest of your review strategy

The link and QR code are the mechanics; they make asking easy and remove friction for the customer. They do not replace the rest of a review strategy — consistently asking, training staff to mention it, handling complaints before they become one-star reviews. For the wider set of tactics, read our companion piece, 12 ways to get more Google reviews. Use this guide to build and roll out the link itself, and that one to decide how to ask.

Conclusion

A Google review link turns "find us on Google and leave a review" into a single tap. Find your Place ID, build the link on https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=, test it on a phone, and turn it into a QR code for anything printed — or let the free Google Review Link Generator do all of that from your Maps URL. Share it where customers already are when their experience ends, ask everyone shortly after the visit, keep incentives and gating out of the process, and measure review count and rating against a baseline. When you are running links across many locations, a Google Maps Data Scraper pull gives you every Place ID in one table, and Google Reviews Monitoring keeps track of the reviews your links bring in.

Related reading: 12 Ways to Get More Google Reviews in 2026, How to Monitor Google Reviews Across Multiple Locations, Why Monitoring Online Reviews Matters More Than Ever.