What is the Review Guard alert email?

When it arrives

The check runs once a day, in the 14:00 UTC hour, and picks up every client that has not been looked at in the last 6.5 days. That works out at about one check a week per client. One run gets through up to 50 clients that are due, so if you look after a lot of clients a check can land a day later than you expect.

The very first check on a new client records what Google shows right then and sends nothing. That is deliberate: old 1 star reviews from before you took the client on never arrive as if they were news. From the second check onwards, only a review that appeared since the previous check can raise an alert.

What is in the email

The subject is a warning sign, then New 3★ review at and the client's business name, with the real star rating in place of the 3. Inside, under a Review Guard: heading with the client's name, you get:

• The reviewer's name and the rating they left.
• Their review as Google shows it. A very long review is trimmed.
• Suggested owner response (ready to paste), a 40 to 80 word reply that answers what the reviewer actually said, apologises without getting defensive and offers a concrete next step. It is there whenever the AI draft comes back. If the draft fails, the alert still goes out with the review, just without a suggested response.
• An Open the Client button, which opens that client's page.

Nothing is posted to Google for you. Read the draft, change what you want, then post it yourself or send it to your client to post.

Good to know

• Review Guard reads the recent reviews Google publishes for the business, so it catches new ones as they appear in that list rather than checking the whole review history.
• Only reviews of 3 stars or lower raise an alert. A new 4 or 5 star review never does.
• At most 2 alerts per client per check, so a bad week cannot flood your inbox.
• The alert goes to the login email on your account. It is never sent to your client, and there is no switch to turn it off.