Google Review Cards: QR vs NFC, What to Print, What Gets Scanned

A Google review card is a small printed card that carries a QR code or an NFC chip pointing at your Google review link, handed to a customer at the moment the work is finished. It works because it removes the two steps that lose people: finding your listing and remembering to do it later. Scan, tap, star rating, done.

The cards themselves are the easy part. Any print shop will run them. What decides whether they produce reviews or sit in a drawer is what you encode, what you write on the front, and when you hand it over. Below is what actually matters, including the mistake that quietly points a whole print run at the wrong business.

What is a Google review card?

It is a business card sized piece of print whose only job is to open your Google review form. Most carry a QR code. Some carry an NFC chip instead, so a customer taps their phone against the card rather than opening the camera. A few carry both, which is the safest choice if your customers span a wide age range.

The card is not a Google product and Google does not sell or endorse them. What Google supplies is the destination: the review link, and a QR code image generated inside your Business Profile under Read Reviews, then Get more reviews. Everything printed around that code is your own design decision. There is a longer walkthrough of every route to the underlying URL in our Google review link generator, including how to build one from a Place ID when you cannot sign in to the profile.

QR code or NFC: which review card actually gets used?

QR wins for most businesses, on reliability rather than novelty. Every phone made in the last decade scans a QR code from the native camera app with no setup. NFC feels more impressive and takes one fewer step, but it has real coverage gaps that nobody selling NFC cards tends to lead with.

On iPhone, background NFC tag reading, where you simply hold the phone near the card and a notification appears, works on iPhone XS and XR and every model after. Older iPhones (7, 8 and X) can read tags only from inside an app, which in practice means the customer will not do it. On Android, NFC has to be switched on, and a meaningful number of budget handsets do not include the hardware at all. A QR code has none of those conditions attached.

If you do go NFC, the chip specification matters less than sellers imply. An NTAG213 holds 144 bytes of user memory, which is more than enough for a review URL. NTAG215 (504 bytes) and NTAG216 (888 bytes) exist for richer payloads you will not be using. Paying extra for a bigger chip to store one link is money spent on nothing.

What to print on a Google review card

The single most common failure is a card carrying a naked QR code and a logo. The customer has no idea what will happen if they scan it, so they do not. Give the code a job description.

• One instruction, in plain words. "Scan to leave us a Google review" beats anything clever. The word Google is doing real work here, because it tells people the destination is somewhere they already trust and already have an account.
• The code, at least one inch square. Review cards get scanned at arm's length in restaurant lighting and in vans at dusk. Keep the quiet margin around the code intact and never lay it over a photograph.
• How long it takes. A short line such as "takes about thirty seconds" removes the main unspoken objection.
• Your business name, spelled as it appears on Google. This lets the customer confirm they landed on the right listing, which matters more than you would think for businesses with a common name.
• Nothing else. No social icons, no phone number, no offers. Every extra element is a competing decision.

Print the back plain, or leave it for a handwritten thank you. A card that looks like it was left for you specifically outperforms a glossy one that looks mass produced, which is the opposite of what most printers will steer you toward.

Where review cards work, and where they are wasted

Review cards earn their cost when you meet the customer in person and there is a clear finishing moment. Trades handing over completed work, salons at the counter, dentists at reception, restaurants with the check, car servicing at collection, contractors at final walkthrough. In each case someone is holding a phone, the experience is minutes old, and there is a natural pause.

They are wasted when the moment is fuzzy or remote. Posting cards out with an order almost never works, because the card arrives in a box with the packaging and gets thrown away with it. For ecommerce, an email or text sent a few days after delivery does the same job at a fraction of the cost, and you can see who opened it. The same applies to any business whose customers never physically appear.

One placement worth more than a stack of cards: the same link on your website, on the page customers actually land on. Plenty of local businesses run on a Facebook page and a phone number and have nowhere to put it, and if that is you, standing up a real site is the higher-leverage fix before you spend anything on print.

The mistake that ruins a whole print run

Encoding a link built from the wrong Place ID. This happens constantly to businesses that have moved, that have a duplicate listing nobody merged, or whose card was set up by an agency working from a search result rather than the profile. The cards look perfect. The code scans. It just opens the review form for a listing that is not the one you care about, or for a business across town with a similar name.

Catch it in ninety seconds. Before you approve the proof, scan the code on the proof itself with two different phones and read the business name and address on the review screen. Not the link in the artwork file, the actual scanned result. Then repeat it once on the first delivered box, because artwork gets swapped between proof and press more often than printers admit.

Stale IDs are the slower version of the same problem. Google suggests refreshing stored place IDs that are more than 12 months old, and says the refresh costs nothing when the request specifies only the place ID field. If a card printed two years ago has stopped resolving, that is usually why. Scan your own permanent signage once a quarter and the issue never reaches a customer.

What you cannot print on a review card

Two things, and both get printed all the time by businesses who have not read the policy.

Any incentive. Google's policy is explicit: "Offering incentives, like free or discounted goods or services, in exchange for customers to post reviews, change reviews, or remove negative reviews is considered fake & misleading content and is strictly prohibited." A card reading "scan for 10% off your next visit" is a policy breach printed a thousand times over. So is entry into a prize draw. Asking, with nothing attached, is entirely allowed.

Any request for a specific rating. "Scan to leave us 5 stars" is asking for a sentiment rather than a review, and it also reads as desperate to the person holding it. Beyond Google's rules, the FTC consumer reviews rule (16 CFR Part 465, effective 21 October 2024) addresses paying for a particular sentiment, with penalties reported at $51,744 per violation. Print "leave us a review" and let the work decide the number.

Handing the card only to customers you expect to be happy sits in the same territory. Google prohibits merchants discouraging negative reviews or selectively soliciting positive ones. The compliant and more durable approach is to hand one to everybody, which we go into in more detail in our guide to review gating.

Why is my review card not getting scanned?

Assuming the link is correct, it is nearly always one of four things. The code has no instruction next to it, so nobody knows what it does. It is printed too small or over artwork, so the camera cannot lock on. It is handed over at the wrong moment, usually before the work is finished rather than after. Or it is handed over silently, dropped on the counter with the receipt.

That last one is the biggest and the cheapest to fix. A card handed over with one spoken sentence, "if you have thirty seconds, a Google review really helps us", converts several times better than the same card left in a stack by the till. The print is not the ask. The person is the ask, and the card just removes the friction from saying yes.

Cards are a floor, not a system

Printed cards reach the customers standing in front of you, and only on the day they are standing there. They cannot follow up with the person who meant to scan and forgot, which is most people. They cannot tell you how many reviews came from which location. And they do nothing for the customers you only ever email.

That is the honest limit, and it is why cards work best alongside an automated request rather than instead of one. Sending the same link by text or email on a trigger, then chasing once, catches the ones the card missed, and it runs whether or not anyone remembered to hand a card over that day. We cover the mechanics of that in review generation software, and the wording that gets requests opened in our review request email templates.

Once the reviews start arriving, put them where they change minds. A Google reviews widget on your homepage does more for conversion than the same reviews sitting on Maps, and it is the part of the loop most businesses never close.