Google gives you a review link and a QR code from your Business Profile in about four clicks. You can also build the link yourself from your Place ID, which is what you do when you can't get into the dashboard or you need the URL inside another system. Both work. What most people don't realise is that these are different URLs, and Google publishes a list of which link patterns its iOS app handles. Your link may or may not be on it.

The thing that actually stops people leaving a review is none of that. It's the sign-in screen. Google requires a signed-in Google Account before anyone can post a review, and a customer standing at your counter with a phone in their hand is the person least likely to go through it.

And a printed QR code has two limits worth knowing before you print anything. The destination is fixed inside the picture, so changing it means reprinting. And a scan on its own tells you nothing about which code produced which review.

If you have access to the Business Profile, this is the fastest route and it takes four clicks.

That's Google's own flow, and it hands you both things at once. Google also offers to send the request straight out over email, WhatsApp or a Facebook post from the same screen, which is worth a look if you're only sending a handful. Before you do, is it legal to ask for reviews answers the question most people have at this point.

The review link is a URL with your Place ID in it, and it looks like this:

`` https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=YOUR_PLACE_ID ``

You get the Place ID from Google's Place ID Finder. Search your business, copy the ID, paste it into the URL above. That's the whole job.

You'd build it rather than copy it for three reasons. You don't have access to the Business Profile, which is common when an agency or a former employee still owns it. You need the URL inside something else, like a booking confirmation or a support macro, where somebody has to paste a string rather than click Copy. Or you want the plain URL without the tracking parameters Google's dashboard attaches to the one it gives you.

If you'd rather skip the Place ID step, our free Google review link generator does both halves in one search. Type the business name, pick it from the list, and you get the link and a QR code. There's no email field on the page and no account to make.

Here's where this gets interesting. The links above are not the same URL, and neither are the ones you get from sharing your listing in Google Maps. They're four different shapes, and people talk about them as if they're interchangeable.

They're not, and Google says so itself. In its Maps URL scheme documentation for iOS, last updated 19 August 2026, Google publishes the pattern its iOS app handles as a universal link:

`` (http(s?)://)?((maps\.google\.{TLD}/)|((www\.)?google\.{TLD}/maps/)|(goo.gl/maps/)).* ``

Look at your own link and find it in this table.

What the list means is exactly what Google says it means: these are the patterns the Maps app handles on iOS. For anything not on the list, Google doesn't document any app behaviour at all. That's the honest state of it, and it's more than any other page on this topic will tell you.

One more thing worth knowing, because it surprises people. A g.page link isn't a separate destination. Follow one and it lands on the search.google.com/local/writereview address, which is the same URL you'd have built by hand.

This is the part that actually decides whether you get the review, and almost nobody puts it on the page.

Google is direct about it: "Customers must be signed into a Google Account to leave a review. They can set one up with a non-Gmail email address."

So the customer scans your code, the review box loads, and if they're not signed in they get a Google sign-in screen instead of a star rating. Most people stop there. It isn't your link and it isn't your QR code.

The second half of Google's sentence is the useful half, and it's the bit to give your staff. Anyone can make a Google Account with the email address they already use. It doesn't have to be a Gmail address. That's a ten second answer at the counter instead of a lost review.

Third party reports say Safari makes this worse than other browsers. Birdeye documented a sign-in prompt appearing for customers who were already logged in, in a help article published in November 2025. Treat that as a report rather than something we've measured.

That sounds obvious, and it has two consequences that catch people out after they've paid a printer.

The destination is inside the picture. A QR code isn't pointing at your business, it's pointing at a specific URL, and that URL is encoded in the pattern of squares. Change your mind about where it should go and the code has to be reprinted. Every table tent, every sticker, every business card.

And a scan tells you nothing on its own. Reviews arrive in your listing with no record of how the person got there, so you can't tell whether the code on the check presenter is working and the one by the door is dead. You just see reviews.

Where you put the code matters as much as any of this, and our guide for restaurants works through which surfaces actually get scanned. If you're worried a code at the till breaks Google's rules, the myths everyone repeats covers that one with Google's own wording, including the idea that Google banned QR codes.

The difference comes down to what the QR code has inside it.

Our free generator encodes the Google review URL itself, which is the right answer for a code you print once and leave alone. A magic link works the other way round. Its QR code encodes a short link, rvwz.page/m/yourslug, and that short link is a setting in your account rather than a fixed address. The printed picture never changes. Where it sends people is yours to change whenever you want.

That's also why one code can serve more than one platform. You tell the link what you're trying to achieve, and it routes each person who scans it accordingly.

Setting one up is one screen. You give it an internal name so you can find it later, associate it with a location if you bill by location, and then answer the only question that matters: where to send the customers who click the link. That last part is a list of objectives, and there are three of them:

An objective that has hit its target stops taking clicks, and the next one picks them up. So a code on a table can push Google until your rating is where you want it, then start feeding somewhere else, without anyone touching the printed card.

The QR code downloads as a PNG at 2048 pixels, which is large enough for print. The short link works anywhere you'd paste a URL, so the same magic link goes in an email signature, a support macro or an SMS.

You'll need your Google Business Profile connected before a magic link can send anyone to it. And if you'd rather text the link than print it, the texting laws for review requests are worth reading first.

Every click on a magic link is recorded, which is the part a printed code can't do for you. You see the click, when it happened, and which destination it resolved to. If you want extra context in there, like which of three printed codes was scanned, you add the parameters you care about to the link and they're stored with the click. Nothing is tracked automatically, so what you get is what you asked for.

Then the useful bit. When a review lands on the same profile within sixty seconds of a click, Reviewflowz ties the two together and the review shows up attributed to that scan. So every link carries its own count of clicks and of the reviews they turned into, and you can finally tell which printed code is doing the work.

For a Google review link, which is what this article is about, that's the platform that matters. Tracking review collection performance with magic links goes deeper into the reporting and into how routing decides where each person lands.