23 September 2026 · 6 min read · Oscar Markham
How to answer a bad review without making it worse
A bad review feels personal and the instinct is to defend yourself. That instinct is almost always wrong, not because the reviewer is right but because you are not writing to them. You are writing to the next forty people who read it while deciding whether to ring you.
Who the reply is actually for
The reviewer has already made their judgement and will rarely change it. The audience is everyone who reads the review afterwards, and what they are assessing is not whether you were at fault but how you behave when something goes wrong.
A calm, specific, non-defensive reply to an unfair review is more persuasive than a page of five-star ratings, because it is the only evidence available about what happens when a job goes badly.
The structure that works
Thank them, acknowledge the specific issue, state briefly what happened or what you have changed, and offer to continue the conversation off the platform. Four sentences is plenty.
Avoid explaining at length. A long reply reads as defensive regardless of how reasonable it is, and readers assume the longer side is the guilty one.
- Thank them by name if they used one
- Acknowledge the specific problem, not 'your experience'
- Say what you have done or will do
- Offer a direct contact to resolve it
- Stop
What never to do
Do not dispute facts in public, even when you are right. Do not mention the amount they paid, what they said on the phone, or anything about their behaviour. Do not imply they are lying. Do not reply while angry, which means not replying the same day.
And do not offer a refund in exchange for removal in writing. It reads badly if screenshotted, and on some platforms it breaches the terms.
The review you cannot answer
Sometimes the review is from somebody who was never a customer, or is plainly abusive. Those can be reported, and Google does remove a proportion of them, though slowly and inconsistently.
Report it once, reply politely in the meantime, and move on. Pursuing it further costs more time than it is worth.
The real fix is volume
One poor review among six is damaging. One among sixty is invisible and even mildly reassuring, because a business with no criticism at all looks curated.
If a bad review has hurt you, the answer is not to fight it. It is to ask the next twenty satisfied customers for a review, which most businesses never do.
Written by Oscar Markham, founder of Dublin Growth Digital. We run lead generation for Irish estate agents and trades, reported every Friday in enquiries and booked work.