Review management glossary
Plain-English definitions of the review and reputation terms you'll meet — each one short enough to quote, and linked to where you can go deeper.
Online reputation management (ORM)
Online reputation management (ORM) is the ongoing practice of monitoring, improving, and protecting how a business is perceived across the internet — chiefly through reviews, star ratings, and what shows up in search results. For a local business, ORM is mostly hands-on review work: watching the sites customers actually check, replying to feedback, and steadily earning new reviews so the public picture stays accurate and current. It's a defensive and an offensive discipline at once — fixing what's wrong while building proof of what's right.
Review management
Review management is the day-to-day work of collecting, monitoring, and responding to customer reviews across every platform a business appears on. It's the operational core of online reputation management: requesting reviews from real customers, tracking new ones as they land on Google, Facebook and 100+ other sites, replying promptly, and spotting patterns in what people praise or complain about. Done well, it turns scattered feedback into a steady, manageable flow rather than a fire drill.
Google Business Profile (GBP)
A Google Business Profile (GBP), formerly Google My Business, is the free listing that controls how a business appears in Google Search and Google Maps — name, address, hours, photos, and reviews. It's the single most important asset for local visibility: a complete, active profile with fresh reviews is what gets a business into the local pack and in front of nearby searchers. Reviews left on a GBP also feed directly into Google's local ranking.
Review gating
Review gating is the banned practice of asking only happy customers for public reviews while routing unhappy ones to private feedback. It violates Google and FTC policy; compliant review generation asks every customer the same way.
→ Get more reviews (compliant) · Buying Google reviews: risks · Spot fake & suspicious reviews
Sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis is the use of automated language processing to read whether a review or comment is positive, negative, or neutral — and often to pull out the specific themes driving that feeling. Applied to reviews, it turns hundreds of free-text comments into something you can actually act on: which locations are slipping, what customers love, and where complaints cluster, without anyone reading every review by hand.
Reputation Index
ReviewTactic's composite score out of 100 that summarizes your review health, competitive standing, reply quality, and engagement in a single number — so you know where you stand at a glance.
Local pack
The block of three local business listings, with a map, that Google shows for location-based searches (the "map pack"). Reviews, category relevance, and proximity are the biggest factors in who appears here.
Review velocity
The rate at which a business earns new reviews over time. A steady, natural flow of recent reviews signals an active business and lifts your rating faster than a one-time burst — which can also look suspicious to Google's filters.
Put the terms to work
Knowing the words is step one; acting on them is where ReviewTactic comes in — monitoring, AI replies, and a Reputation Index out of 100, SMB-priced with no contract.
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