The stars sit on top. The bars sit underneath.

Their help page calls it Reputation Management. You drag a slider and set the split. They give a worked example: queue two hundred invites, send sixty percent to Reviews.io and forty percent to other sites, and one hundred and twenty people are pointed one way. Eighty the other. One invite is one review on one platform. They wrote that themselves.

Some builder companies use those channels. Checkatrade. Google. Trustpilot. The public page on each site still looks like a straight average of whoever wrote there. Nobody on that page is told that more people were sent to one site than another.

The invite can land before you have lived with the job. You pick the car up. You get home. Twenty four hours. Forty eight. A week. Write now, or the link dies. I do not write a review of a car the day I collect it. I have not sat in the traffic. I have not heard the rattle. Same with a roof. Same with a boiler. Same with a haircut that looks fine in the chair and wrong in the morning.

A clock like that is not illegal. Happy people still tap five stars while they are being nice at the desk. People who find the fault later can miss the window. The next family only sees the number.

Their help page goes one step further. Before they send you to Trustpilot or Google they can ask if you were satisfied. If you say no, it can go to a support inbox instead of a public page. They wrote that Google and Trustpilot do not want that step, because it goes against those sites’ rules. The sliders are still there. A firm that buys the product can see all of this. A family looking at the stars cannot.