What we check before a reply reaches you

Writing a reply to a Google review is not the hard part. You can write it yourself, and you can use ChatGPT or any other AI to help — we would not pretend otherwise. The hard part is reading it back and knowing what to look for. Three things decide whether a reply helps you or quietly costs you: what it could cost you legally, whether it sounds like you rather than like everyone else, and what the next customer takes from it — because the person your reply is really for is not the reviewer, it is the stranger reading the page a month later. Every reply we write is checked against all three before you see it, and anything that fails is written again, not softened. We are not going to publish the list itself, for the same reason the recipe is not printed on the bucket.

You do not have to take that on trust either. On the next page there are real one and two-star reviews from London cafés, the reply that is actually published underneath each one today, and the reply we write for the same review — with the same score under both.