Testimonials and reviews influence buying decisions before you ever get on a call with a prospect. Someone reads three reviews, checks your rating against a competitor’s, and forms an opinion about your business before you’ve said a word. Most businesses know this but still treat reviews as an afterthought, something you ask for occasionally instead of something built into how you run the business.
GoHighLevel, the platform behind our software Marketecs Engine, has a full reputation management system built in, and it goes well beyond sending out a Google review link after a sale. It lets you request, collect, track, and respond to reviews across Google, Amazon, Yelp, and dozens of other platforms, all from one dashboard. It includes competitor analysis, video testimonial collection, AI-generated responses, review link balancing, QR codes for in-person requests, and a workflow automation action that triggers review requests based on real customer behavior instead of a manual send.
In this guide, we’ll walk through every part of it: the dashboard, the request and tracking tools, the settings that control how and when requests go out, and the new workflow action that turns the entire process into something automatic instead of something you have to remember to do. Watch the full walkthrough below.
Video Time Stamps
00:00 Why reviews and referrals matter for service pros
00:15 What we’re covering in this demo
01:10 Reputation dashboard + competitor analysis
01:38 Sending one-off review requests (Email, SMS, WhatsApp)
02:13 Reviews tab, imports, filters, spam detection
02:31 Video testimonials + why video matters
03:00 Website widgets to showcase reviews
03:15 Settings tour, AI responses, review links, balancing
04:34 Multi-message request sequences + retries
05:37 QR codes for in-person businesses
06:01 Review platform integrations
06:49 Google Business Profile optimization tips
07:18 How to work with me, affiliate vs consult
08:39 The new way to trigger review requests (Workflows)
10:47 New action: “Send Review Request” explained
11:27 Wrap up, why this is a must-use feature
Links
Learn more about Marketecs Engine and its capabilities.
Need Help? Book a free consult.
Check out our YouTube Channel for more tips and tutorials.
Why Reviews Need a System, Not a Reminder
The most common mistake businesses make with reviews is not having a process in place to keep it all organized. A request goes out here and there, usually when someone remembers, and the results are inconsistent because the effort is inconsistent. Reputation management inside GoHighLevel is built to fix that by tying review requests directly to your CRM, so a request can trigger automatically based on a tag, a pipeline stage, or a completed action, rather than depending on someone on your team to send it manually.
Inside the Reputation Management Dashboard
Opening Reputation Management from the left-hand menu puts you on the Overview tab, which shows your review statistics at a glance. A newer addition here is competitor analysis, which lets you add up to three competitors and see how your review volume and rating compare to theirs. It’s a useful gut check for whether your review requests need more urgency, especially in a market where prospects are actively comparing options.
Sending and Tracking Review Requests
- The Requests tab is where you send one-off review requests to specific contacts, by email, SMS, or WhatsApp, and you can attach photos if relevant. This covers the case where you want to reach out to a single past customer without building a full automation first.
- The Reviews tab shows every review that’s come in through the system, and you can also manually add reviews you collected before setting any of this up, so your dashboard reflects your full review history rather than only what’s arrived since you turned the feature on. A built-in spam filter flags reviews that look fake or automated, which matters more every year as review fraud becomes a bigger problem for local businesses.
One of the newer additions here is video testimonial collection. Once configured, you get a dedicated space to collect video responses, along with a video collector view and any replies attached to them. Video carries more weight than text right now, particularly as buyers become more skeptical of written reviews that could have been generated or edited. If you haven’t asked customers for a video testimonial before, this is a low-effort way to start.
Showcasing Reviews on Your Website
As reviews come in, GoHighLevel automatically builds a widget out of them that you can embed on any website, whether it’s built on the platform or not. If your site is built with GoHighLevel, adding the widget takes a few clicks. If it isn’t, you can still grab the code and drop it in. Either way, the reviews you’re collecting don’t just sit in a dashboard. They show up where prospects are actually making decisions.
Settings: Where the Real Configuration Happens
The Settings tab is where reputation management goes from a collection tool to an actual system, and it covers several distinct pieces worth understanding individually.
AI review responses. You can turn on AI-generated responses to incoming reviews, add a delay so replies don’t look instant and automated, and build the response process around a specific agent if you want more control over tone.
Review Links and Balancing
You choose which platform you want review requests to point to. That could be a single platform like Google, a custom link page that lists every platform you collect reviews on and lets the customer pick, or review balancing, which automatically splits requests across multiple platforms according to a ratio you set. If you want half your reviews on Google and half on Facebook, for example, balancing handles that without any manual tracking on your end.
Message Timing and Retries
For both SMS and email requests, you control exactly how the sequence runs: send immediately, wait an hour, or set a custom delay, then decide whether to follow up if there’s no response and how many times. A typical setup might be:
- Initial message
- Two follow-ups
- A repeat cycle for up to two months if the customer still hasn’t responded
WhatsApp Requests
These work the same way as SMS and email, giving you a third channel depending on where your customers are most responsive.
QR Codes
For brick-and-mortar businesses, GoHighLevel generates a QR code you can print and place at a front desk or on tables, so in-person customers can leave a review on the spot instead of waiting for a follow-up message that might get ignored.
Spam Detection
This can be toggled on or off and helps filter out reviews that don’t look legitimate before they hit your dashboard.
Platform Integrations
GoHighLevel connects to a long list of review platforms out of the box, including:
- Yelp
- Amazon
- Airbnb
- Better Business Bureau
- TripAdvisor
- Zillow
- DoorDash
- Uber Eats
- And more
You can also add custom links for platforms that aren’t listed. Whatever industry you’re in, there’s a strong chance the platform that matters most to you is already supported.
Google Business Profile Optimization
Because so much review activity ties back to Google, GoHighLevel includes a Google Business Profile optimization page. Once connected, it analyzes your profile and flags what’s missing or could be improved, such as an incomplete address or outdated business information. It’s a small feature, but an incomplete Google profile can quietly cost you visibility in local search results, so it’s worth checking even if you think your profile is already in good shape.
Automating It All: The New “Send Review Request” Workflow Action
Everything above still required someone to trigger the request, whether manually or through a basic automation with an email or SMS action that included a review link. That approach worked, but it created a gap: requests sent through a generic email or SMS action didn’t show up as tracked requests inside the Reputation Management dashboard, so you’d lose visibility into what had actually gone out.
GoHighLevel recently added a dedicated Send Review Request action inside workflows, which closes that gap. Instead of hardcoding a review link into an email, you add this action to any existing workflow and it automatically uses whatever request settings you’ve already configured, meaning it respects your channel choice, your link balancing, and your retry sequence, and it logs the request so it shows up in your dashboard like any other review request.
The trigger point is up to you and depends on your business. Common options include:
- A tag applied at a specific point in a customer’s journey, such as after a purchase or completed service
- A pipeline stage change, if you’re using opportunity pipelines to track customers
- A set delay after onboarding or purchase, such as automatically requesting a review six months after someone becomes a customer
- A completed survey or feedback form, using a strong response as the trigger to ask for a public review
Once the trigger fires, you can add a short wait step if you don’t want the request to feel immediate, then drop in the Send Review Request action, choose the channel, and save. From that point forward, the request goes out and gets tracked automatically every time the trigger condition is met.
Why This Matters
The businesses that consistently win on reputation aren’t the ones with the best product story. They’re the ones that ask for reviews every time, not just when someone remembers to. Automating the request removes the dependency on memory or bandwidth, and tracking the requests inside the same system as your CRM means you can see exactly who’s been asked, who’s responded, and who might need a different follow-up approach.
It also means reputation management isn’t a separate subscription or a bolt-on tool. It’s part of the same platform running your pipelines, your automations, and your marketing, which is the same argument that applies to AI features across GoHighLevel more broadly: a connected system does more with less maintenance than a stack of disconnected tools ever will.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is reputation management in GoHighLevel?
It’s a built-in feature set for requesting, collecting, tracking, and responding to customer reviews across platforms like Google, Yelp, and Amazon, plus tools for video testimonials, website widgets, and Google Business Profile optimization.
Does GoHighLevel automatically send review requests?
Yes, through the Send Review Request workflow action. You can attach it to any automation and trigger it based on a tag, pipeline stage, or timed delay, and it will use your configured settings for channel, timing, and follow-ups.
Can I control which review platform customers are sent to?
Yes. You can focus requests on a single platform, use review balancing to split requests across multiple platforms by percentage, or send a custom link page that lets the customer choose which platform to leave a review on.
Does GoHighLevel support video testimonials?
Yes. Video testimonial collection is a newer feature that includes a dedicated collector view and response tracking, separate from written reviews. Here’s our tutorial specifically on video reviews in GHL – https://youtu.be/E3AxCUGPyPs.
Is reputation management included with GoHighLevel, or is it a separate cost?
It’s built into the platform as part of the CRM and marketing suite, not sold as a separate add-on.
Where to Start
If reviews and testimonials matter to your business, and for most businesses they do, the fastest win is connecting your review platforms and setting up one automated trigger, even something as simple as tagging a customer after purchase to fire the Send Review Request action. From there, you can layer in link balancing, video testimonials, and Google Business Profile optimization as you go.
If you want help setting this up inside your own account, book a consultation.
You can also learn more about Marketecs Engine and how it puts a full reputation management system to work alongside the rest of your marketing automation.
