What is Review Guard and when will I get a bad review alert?

When it checks

The check runs once a day and picks up every client that has not been looked at in the last 6.5 days, so each client is checked about once a week. You do not switch it on: promoting a deal to a client is all it needs.

The very first check on a new client records a baseline and sends nothing. That is deliberate. It means old 1 star reviews from before you took them on never land in your inbox as if they were news. From the second check onwards, only reviews that appeared since the previous check can raise an alert.

When an alert fires

• The new review is rated 3 stars or lower. A new 4 or 5 star review never raises an alert.
• At most 2 alerts per client per check, so a bad week cannot flood your inbox.
• Alerts go to the login email on your account (the account owner's, if you work from a team seat). They never go to your client.

What the email says

The subject is a warning sign, then the review's star rating and the client's business name, for example ⚠ New 2★ review at Bayside Plumbing. Inside you get the reviewer's name, the first part of their review as Google shows it, cut short if it is long, and, when the AI draft comes back in time, Suggested owner response (ready to paste): a short reply, 40 to 80 words, that answers what the reviewer actually said, apologises without getting defensive and offers a concrete next step. An Open the Client button takes you to that client's page.

Nothing is posted to Google for you. Read the draft, change what you want, and paste it into the owner response 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 auditing the whole review history.
• One run checks up to 50 clients that are due, so with a lot of clients a check can land a day later than you expect.
• The alert arrives as an email only. Nothing is added to the client's page when one fires.