What to write underneath a 1-star review

Three people read that reply. Only one of them matters.

The reviewer reads it. They made their mind up before they typed a word and nothing you write is changing it. Write for them and you will end up arguing.

Someone who knows them reads it. Fine, but there is one of those.

Then there is the person you have never met, 4 months from now, standing in a laundry with a dead unit, deciding whether to ring you or the next name down. There are hundreds of that person, and plenty of them will scroll to your worst review. They are not judging the complaint. They are reading directly underneath it to see what kind of business you are when something goes wrong.

That is the whole job. The review is a moment. The reply is your standing answer to it, sitting there for years.

Three sentences. That is the structure.

Longer is not more sincere. A reply longer than the review above it reads as a defence, and a defence reads as guilt to anybody skimming.

1. Name the thing that went wrong, in their words, without softening it. Not “we’re sorry you had that experience”. Say the actual failure out loud. This is the sentence that costs something, which is exactly why it works — the reader can see you are not hiding behind it.
2. Say what you did about it. Past tense. Specific. Not “we take feedback seriously”. What changed, what got fixed, what it cost you. A stranger cannot verify it, but they can tell the difference between a specific and a slogan instantly.
3. Open one door and stop. A way to reach a person, no conditions, no last word. Then finish. The urge to add a fourth sentence explaining your side is the urge to lose.

A worked example

The review below is invented. No business, customer or job in it is real. It is written the way real ones are written, which is the point — the useful version to practise on is one where the customer has a fair complaint and you cannot argue your way out of it.

“Paid $3,900 for a new split system. Woke up the next morning to water coming through the lounge room ceiling. Rang at 7am, was told someone would be out. Nobody came for 3 days while the plaster kept dripping. Unit might be fine now but I’ve got a stained ceiling and nobody has offered to do anything about it. Would not use again.”

The instinct is to explain. The drain line was fitted correctly and something shifted. The 3 days were a supplier delay. The office did ring twice. Some of that may be true. None of it belongs in the reply, because explanation reads to a stranger as a business building a case against its own customer.

Here is the reply.

“You had water coming through your ceiling the morning after our install, and then waited 3 days for us — both of those are on us, and the second one has no excuse. We’ve changed how the drain line gets signed off so a second person checks it before the truck leaves, and we’re covering the plasterer for your ceiling. Ring the office on the number on this listing and we’ll lock in a date today.”

Read it as the stranger in the laundry. They now know 3 things a wall of 5-star reviews could never have told them: something went wrong, you said so plainly, and you paid for it. That is a better advertisement than the complaint is a warning.

When the review is not true

Same restraint. Correct exactly one fact, flatly, with no adjectives, then go straight to the door.

“We don’t have a job at that address on our books, so this may be a mix-up with another business — happy to be wrong. Ring the office with the date and we’ll check it properly and sort it either way.”

Notice what is missing. No “this is completely false”. No “we suspect a competitor”. No exclamation marks. The reader cannot know who is telling the truth. The only signal they have is which of the 2 parties is behaving calmly.

The 2 lines that make it worse

Both feel reasonable while you are typing them. Both do more damage than the review did.

“We have no record of you as a customer.” Even when it is accurate, it lands as a business whose first instinct is to check whether you count. The stranger reading it thinks: that is what they will say about me. If you genuinely cannot find the job, use the mix-up version above — same fact, opposite effect.

“We attempted to contact you on numerous occasions.” This is a scoreboard, published in front of everybody. You are now counting phone calls against a customer in public. Whatever the tally is, the reader sees a business that keeps count of grievances, and a business that keeps count is a business that will keep count of them.

A shorter list of the smaller ones, all of which do the same quiet damage:

• “As per our terms and conditions.” Nobody in the history of Google has read a review reply and thought: good, they have terms.
• “We’re sorry you feel that way.” Everybody knows what this means. It is an apology for their emotional state, which is worse than no apology.
• Identical replies on every review. Copy and paste the same thank-you 30 times and the whole profile reads as automated. It also makes the one reply you wrote by hand look like an exception.
• Working your suburb and trade into the reply. A reply that ends “for all your air conditioning needs in the northern suburbs” tells the reader you saw a complaint and thought about search engines.
• Asking them in public to take it down. That request is now permanently visible under a 1-star review. Ask privately or not at all.
• Anything mentioning lawyers. It escalates, it gets screenshotted, and it turns one bad review into a story.

Reporting it to Google, honestly

You can flag a review from your profile and ask for it to be removed. Here is what that actually is.

It is a policy check, not an arbitration. Google is not weighing your account against the customer’s to decide who is right. It checks the review against its content rules (checked 16 September 2026) — fake engagement, off-topic content that is not a customer experience, profanity, personal information, impersonation, and conflicts of interest like a competitor or an ex-employee. Reviews that clearly breach those do get removed, and one that does is worth flagging.

What will not get removed is a truthful, unflattering account of a real job you really did, however harshly it is written and however unfair one detail in it is. A customer being angry is not a policy breach. It is a customer being angry.

So flag it if it genuinely breaches, then write the reply and assume the review is staying. No timeframe is published, and while Google does offer an appeal, plan on the review staying. A plan whose first step is “get it taken down” is not a plan. The reply is the part that is entirely in your hands.

One practical note: replies get published by a person, inside your Google Business Profile. No shortcut, about 4 minutes.

The 4-star ones, while you are in there

A profile where the owner has answered every review, including the middling ones, briefly and without arguing, reads completely differently from 40 reviews with silence underneath them.

Two sentences on a good one is plenty, and it has to name something from the job. “Thanks Dave” is worth nothing. “Thanks Dave, that switchboard was a lot older than either of us expected” is worth reading, because it proves a human who was there wrote it.

And when a job does go wrong, ask that customer for a review anyway. The same message goes to everyone, and the fixed-it-properly reviews are often the most persuasive ones on the whole profile.