Search results, review boards and other people’s posts all describe your agency without asking you. Two searches show you what they say. Then check your review habits against UK guidance, because some review tactics put you at risk under it.
We report what UK regulators and platforms say, and link each source. This is not legal advice, so ask a solicitor how the rules apply to your agency.
Search your agency’s name the way Google’s raters do
Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines, dated 11 September 2025, tell raters how to judge a website. They define reputation by the experience of real users and the opinions of experts. The guidelines tell raters to be sceptical of what a site says about itself.
They look for independent reviews, references, expert recommendations and news articles. The guidelines also tell raters to be sceptical of positive and negative reviews alike. Anyone can write them, including the site owner.
The guidelines list four example searches for a brand. Two use the brand name and two use the domain name in quotation marks. Run these two for your agency:
- `your agency name -site:youragency.com`
- `your agency name reviews -site:youragency.com`
The `-site:` part removes your own domain from the results. Then sort what remains. Note which results you wrote, which others wrote, and which are false, out of date or hostile.
Each group has a next step:
- Results others wrote are the independent evidence raters look for. You cannot write them yourself. The review rules below cover how to ask clients for reviews.
- Update any page you wrote that is out of date.
- For false or hostile results, use the sections on fake reviews and hostile links below.
These guidelines do not set rankings. They state that no single rating directly decides how a page appears in Google Search. They do show how Google defines reputation, so they are a useful check on your own results.
The City Butterflies case study reports brand searches at position one in June 2026. We built that brand over nearly ten years. The case study reports search positions only.
Check what each place allows
| Place | What the sources say |
|---|---|
| Your own website | UK review rules cover reviews you publish there. Pages that mark up reviews you control about yourself are ineligible for star results. |
| Google Maps | Google lists adult services as restricted. Uploaded content about them may not carry calls to action, purchase links, contact details for buying, promotions or pricing. |
| Meta | The Sexual Solicitation standard prohibits offering, asking for or giving contact details for prostitution. Its examples include escort services. |
This guide does not cover the policies of third-party review boards. Read a board’s own terms before you send clients to it.
Google’s Business Profile guidelines say nothing on adult services and point to the Maps policy. That Maps contributed content policy does not mention escort agencies by name.
Google’s separate eligibility page sets other conditions. To qualify, your agency must make in-person contact with customers during its stated hours. It lists lead generation agents or companies as ineligible. The page also says businesses tied to age-restricted products or services cannot be service-area businesses without a storefront. Its examples are alcohol, cannabis and weapons, and it does not mention escort services. Whether you can hold a profile depends on how your agency works.
Meta’s Sexual Solicitation standard allows educational, awareness and news content, and discussion of sex work regulation. Meta lists escort services as an example of offering sexual encounters, which the standard prohibits. The prohibition covers an account that offers your agency’s services. Our social media strategies post covers how restricted adult brands run their accounts.
Marking up your own testimonials with schema will not earn star ratings. Google’s review snippet documentation, last updated 8 September 2026, covers this. Pages with LocalBusiness or Organization markup are ineligible for star results when the business controls its own reviews. A third-party widget on your site does not change that, and violations can bring a manual action.
What the UK review rules say
Schedule 20 of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 bans fake reviews and concealed incentivised reviews. It also requires traders not to publish reviews in a misleading way. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) published its guidance on the ban, CMA208, on 4 April 2025. A CMA statement dated 7 April 2025 says the provisions are in force. It says the CMA can fine firms that break the rules up to 10% of global turnover.
The guidance covers reviews a business publishes on its own website (paras 4.1 and 8.3).
| Tactic | CMA208 guidance | Google Maps policy |
|---|---|---|
| Offer a discount or voucher for a review | You must tell readers it was incentivised. The review must reflect the reviewer’s genuine experience (paras 2.10 and 3.7). | Bars incentives such as payment, discounts or free goods or services. |
| Publish only the good reviews on your own site | Selectively promoting positive reviews may infringe the law (para 4.3). | Not applicable to your own site. |
| Invite only satisfied clients to review you | Encouraging only satisfied customers to review may be cherry-picking (para 4.5). | Bars selectively soliciting positive reviews and discouraging negative ones. |
| Edit or remove a genuine negative review on your own site | Suppressing genuine negative reviews may infringe the law (para 4.3). You should not limit access to negative reviews by editing, withholding or removing them (para 4.4). | Not applicable to your own site. |
| Write or buy a review | Fake reviews are a banned practice (para 1.1). | Bars fake engagement and reviews paid for directly or in kind. |
The two rules differ on incentives. The CMA guidance allows a disclosed incentive for a genuine review. Google Maps does not allow incentives for a review at all. A business that follows only the CMA guidance can still break Google’s policy.
The guidance lists banned examples. One is offering a free or discounted product for a five-star review that does not reflect genuine experience. Google says merchants may solicit genuine reviews without incentives. Ask every client, including the unhappy ones.
A related rule covers influencers you pay or incentivise to feature your agency. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) says their content must be obviously identifiable as advertising. A note in the influencer’s bio is not enough on its own.
Paragraphs 8.5 and 8.6 of the CMA guidance set out what review publishers need to do. Write a clear policy for preventing and removing banned reviews and false or misleading review information. Banned reviews are fake and concealed incentivised ones. Assess the risks of this material appearing on your site. Take reasonable, proportionate proactive steps to prevent and remove it. Regularly check whether those steps work and fix any gaps.
Our Boutique Agency website package includes a client review system with a manual verification process. Ask us how it treats a negative review, then check the answer against the table above.
Keep client details out of reviews and testimonials
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) lists data concerning a person’s sex life and sexual orientation as special category data. Inferred information counts too, if you process data to reach a conclusion about one of those categories. Your confidence in the inference does not matter.
The ICO last updated the page on 9 April 2024. The page says the guidance is under review for the Data (Use and Access) Act. It does not mention escort testimonials. Ask a solicitor whether a client’s review, booking record or review request list counts as special category data.
Leave out names, handles, dates and places that point to one client. Our adult business data security guide covers what you hold, where to store it and when to delete it.
What Google removes, and what to do about a fake review
Google’s page on reporting a review assumes you manage a Business Profile. Whether you can hold one depends on the eligibility conditions above.
Google removes a reported review only if it breaks Google’s policies. It does not remove reviews because they are negative or because the owner disagrees. It does not step into disputes between a business and a customer. After a report closes with no policy violation, you get one appeal. Google says evaluation typically takes several days.
So report a review that is fake or breaks a policy. Google leaves a review up when it does not break a policy, however critical it is. The rater guidelines call a few negative reviews normal for any business.
If you reply to a genuine review, do not confirm the reviewer was a client. Do not repeat any booking detail.
Do not offer to resolve a complaint on condition that the client leaves no negative review. The CMA guidance lists that offer as interference with reviewers (para 4.4). It lists threats of harm or legal action too.
Hostile links, fake listings and false notices
A hostile campaign can reach your name without a single review. Our negative SEO guide describes two routes, spam links and fake listings. Our marketing page names a third, false DMCA removals.
The November 2024 core update cost Escorta, Italy’s largest Italian-language escort directory, 73% of its top-three rankings in Italy. A flood of low-quality, hostile backlinks followed. Referring domains went from under 1,000 to over 2,600 in a single month.
We acquired genuine authority links to outweigh the spam. We also watched the backlink profile constantly, separating real links from hostile ones. The Escorta case study reports its average position improving from 12.6 to 7.2. It reports top-three rankings in Italy back within 9% of the pre-penalty peak.
Our guide to false DMCA notices explains how to counter one. Our DMCA page sets out how we read a notice before we act on it.
Monitor your name and your links
Our marketing page lists malicious link and brand monitoring in the Market Dominance plan. It covers suspicious links and malicious tactics such as false DMCA removals.
Check your search results and review boards yourself with the two searches above. Run them on a schedule you will keep. The rater guidelines give no schedule for these searches. Run them again after a drop in enquiries, a removal notice or a listing you did not create.
Ask us a question
Not sure which of your review habits to change first, or what your own results show? Ask us and we will tell you straight. Our escort agency page covers the wider work we do for agencies.
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