Boulevard only shows the Google review link to clients who rated you 4 or 5 stars. Clients who rated you 3 or less are never asked, which is why your Boulevard ratings pile up and your Google review count does not move. Boulevard documents this itself.
That split is review gating, and Google prohibits it. A profile caught doing it can be stopped from receiving new reviews, have its existing reviews unpublished, and carry a warning telling consumers that fake reviews were removed.
The fix is to ask every client and handle bad reviews fast instead of hiding them. Setup is four steps and you never touch an API.
Your clients are leaving you five stars. Google never sees them.
Boulevard asks your client to rate the appointment. They do it, the rating lands in your Boulevard dashboard, and your Google listing stays exactly where it was.
Ask anyone else running a med spa on Boulevard and you get the same story. Three of them, from one thread in an owners' group:
"We love that Boulevard automatically collects reviews, but the issue is that they stay internal and don't translate into Google reviews."
"We have great reviews, but can't get a single Google review, no one wants to do it twice!"
"We already have over 100 5 star reviews extra inside boulevard and they won't get transferred to Google."
A hundred clients wrote something good about you. None of it counts where anyone is looking.
It is not a setting you missed. Boulevard filters at three stars.
Most owners assume they configured something wrong, or that the front desk is not asking. Neither is true. Boulevard documents the behaviour itself, in the same sentence in two separate help articles:
"For ratings of 3 stars or less, clients will not be prompted to share their rating to other platforms. For reviews rated 4 or 5 stars, clients will be prompted to share their rating to Google, Yelp, or Facebook."
Your client rates you | What Boulevard shows them next |
4 or 5 stars | An invitation to post it on Google, Yelp or Facebook |
3 stars or less | Nothing. The rating stays inside Boulevard. |
There is no setting to turn that split off. It is how the feature works.
That filter breaks Google's policy
Google's rule is one sentence, under Rating manipulation: merchants may not "discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers."
Boulevard prompts the fours and fives and prompts nobody else. That is selectively soliciting positive reviews, in Google's own words, running on your Business Profile under your name.
Google publishes what it does about it:
The profile stops receiving new reviews and ratings for a period.
The reviews already on it are unpublished for a period.
The profile displays a warning telling consumers that fake reviews were removed.
Take the third one seriously. You survive a quiet few months. A notice on your listing telling every prospective patient that fake reviews were removed is different, and your booking software did it for you.
The workaround being sold to med spas is the same violation
There is a build sold into this exact market, usually on top of a CRM. Text everyone a one to five star survey after the visit, send the happy ones to Google, route the unhappy ones to a private form. The people selling it know the rule and say so: "Google bans review gating." Their defence is that the Google link appears on both paths.
Look at what each group actually gets.
Rated 4 or 5 | Rated 1 to 3 | |
First screen | A thank you | A complaint form |
The Google link | The only thing on the page | Below the form |
Follow up | A reminder at 24 hours, another at 72 | None |
Told what to write | Yes, "mention your provider or treatment" | No |
One group gets asked three times and coached on what to say. The other gets a form. Google's test is not whether the link exists somewhere on the page, it is whether you solicit selectively. The pitch admits what it is built for: the system "guards your public rating" and cuts public one star posts by about 40 percent. You cannot do that without discouraging negative reviews.
You do not need to filter anything
You only need a gate if you assume the honest answer will hurt you. If you run a clean shop it does not.
Ask every client and the ratio takes care of itself, because most of them are happy and the occasional bad one gets buried by volume instead of hidden by software. Google says as much: it tells businesses to remind customers to leave reviews, and allows soliciting genuine experiences as long as you are not "attempting to influence the rating or the contents of the review."
Bad reviews still need handling, fast rather than hidden. A one star review you see within the hour is a phone call and often a fix. The same review found three weeks later is permanent.
What happens instead: every client gets asked
Reviewflowz sends the review request itself, so the ask leaves Boulevard's flow entirely.
It fires when the appointment is marked complete, not at checkout. That matters in a med spa, because a client who pre-paid a package of injectables was charged before anything happened to them.
Every client with an email address or a mobile number gets asked. There is no rating question first, no survey, no branch. When they tap the link they land on Google's own review form.
Negative reviews get caught instead of filtered. You set a threshold, three stars or less by default, and anything at or below it arrives in Slack, Teams or email within a couple of hours.
Asking everyone is the whole product. Reviewflowz review generation has no rating step to configure, so there is nothing to filter by. The request goes out by email, SMS or WhatsApp, and the link opens Google's write a review form. The same rule applies to the client who is going to give you two stars, and that is the point. Full detail on the Boulevard integration, and what we do for med spas and salons.
Setting it up
1. Turn off Boulevard's rating requests
Open Manage Location, then Client Notifications, then Rating request, and switch off email and text. Leave it on and you are asking twice, and clients will not do it twice.
2. Ask us to switch the integration on
Message us and we will ask Boulevard's team to activate the integration on your account. You do not create a developer account or paste credentials anywhere.
3. Link your locations
For accounts billed per location. One connection covers your whole Boulevard business. Linking tells us which review profile a location's clients should be sent to.
4. Turn requests on before the next appointment finishes
It does not work backwards. A client whose appointment completes while requests are off is never sent one.
Who gets credited, and what it costs
Every staff member on the appointment is credited, and one appointment covering several services credits each of them. When a name is ambiguous the review waits for a human rather than crediting the wrong person.
That is what fills a team leaderboard.
What it costs, published. $70 per location per month billed annually, or $80 month to month with no commitment of any sort. That is Premium, the plan attribution sits on. Messaging is metered at $5 per 1,000 emails and $5 per 100 SMS. No setup fee, no contract, no notice period. The 14 day trial does not ask for a card, and Habit Med Spa and Facial Bar, who run this on Boulevard, get a Google review from 15% of their clients against a 7.5% average across Reviewflowz customers.
Questions people ask
Can I move the reviews already in Boulevard to Google? No, and neither can anyone else. Export the list from Manage Location, then Ratings, and ask those clients going forward. Ask all of them, not just the five star ones.
Will my past clients get a request? No. Only appointments completed after you connect.
A client pre-paid and never came in. Do they get asked? No. Nothing sends until the appointment is marked complete.
Can I run both? You can, but you are asking the same person twice for the same thing.
Nothing is sending. Check the campaign is on, the location is linked, and the client has an email or mobile number.