Search for a Google review card and every result is a shop. Tap cards, acrylic counter stands, NFC discs, sticker packs. What none of them lead with is what you are actually buying: a piece of printed plastic wrapped around a web address that Google hands you for nothing.
Once that is clear the decisions get simple. Which link goes on it, what gets printed around the link, where the object stands, and what to check before you order a box.
What the card actually points at
Every review card, however it is sold, resolves to the same destination: the Google form where a customer writes the review. That form is addressed by your Place ID, the code Google uses to identify your business on Maps.
The address looks like this:
https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=YOUR_PLACE_ID
Two things follow. First, you already own the destination, so nobody can sell it to you. Second, a card is only as good as the Place ID printed into it, which is why finding yours is step one. The free Place ID finder returns it, and the review link generator turns it into the finished link.
Making one for free
The Google review QR code generator prints the card for you. Paste your Place ID or your Google Maps link, put in your business name, and pick a format:
- Card, 4x6 inches. The counter or table tent shape.
- Poster, Letter size. Front door, waiting room wall, back of the restroom door.
- Sticker, 3x3 inches. Window, packaging, the side of a toolbox.
Then print it, or save it as a PDF and send that file to a print shop. There is no signup and no watermark, and the layout carries your business name so the customer can see they are reviewing the right place before they scan.
If you want the mechanics of the code itself rather than the card around it, how to create a Google review QR code covers that separately.
QR or NFC, and the catch nobody prints on the box
The two card types differ in one way that matters.
A QR code is read by the camera app on any modern phone with no setup, and it works from across a counter. It is also inert: the code is the address, so what you printed is what the customer gets, forever.
An NFC card is tapped rather than scanned. It skips the camera, which feels better in the hand, and it does nothing at all for a customer whose phone is face-down in a bag or whose device does not read tags without being unlocked and held right.
Now the part worth pausing on. Sellers advertise that you can change where the card points without reprinting it. That convenience is not magic, it is an indirection: a card whose destination can be edited later is not pointing at Google at all, it is pointing at the seller's own web address, which then forwards to Google. The card works for exactly as long as that company keeps that redirect alive.
That may be a fine trade for you. It is a different product from a code that contains your Google address and nothing else, and it is worth knowing which one is in your hand before it is glued to the counter.
What to print around the code
Keep it to three things: what the customer is being asked to do, who is asking, and the code itself. A card that has to be read is a card that gets ignored, because the reader is a person mid-goodbye holding a card reader in the other hand.
What not to print is the shorter list, and it is a policy matter rather than a design one. Google's own guidance for businesses says not to offer incentives for reviews and not to selectively solicit positive ones, so a card promising a discount for a review, or asking specifically for five stars, is a card that puts your profile at risk to save a sentence. Ask for the review, not for the rating. What Google's review policy forbids sets out the rest.
Where the card goes
Placement is the whole game, because the card only works on somebody who is both finished and still standing there.
- The payment counter. The customer is stationary, the transaction is done, and the phone is often already out.
- The table, for anywhere people sit. A tent card survives a whole meal in peripheral vision.
- The invoice or the leave-behind, for anyone who works in vans. The technician is gone before the customer thinks to say thank you, so the card has to go home with them.
- Packaging, for anything shipped. The card arrives at the moment the box is opened.
- The front door or the window, which reaches people on the way out rather than at the desk.
Somewhere that is not on this list: anywhere the customer is still waiting for something from you. A code at the point where the job is not finished asks for a verdict before there is one.
Test it before you order a batch
Print one, tape it where it will live, and go through it as a customer would.
- Stand where the customer stands, not where you stand. A code sized for a card fails from across a room.
- Open the plain camera app rather than a scanner app. That is what your customer has.
- Check what loads. It should be the Google review form for your business, with the star row ready and your name at the top.
- Try it in the actual light of the room. Glossy stock under a downlight reflects the lens back at itself, which is why matte stock is worth asking the print shop for.
If the code opens the wrong business, the Place ID is wrong, and every card in the box would have been wrong too.
The ceiling on any printed card
A card reaches the people who look at it. It never reaches the customer who paid at the door, booked online, settled up by card in the driveway, or was already back in their car. That is not a design flaw you can fix with a bigger poster.
The businesses that keep a steady flow of reviews use the card for the people in front of them and a message for everybody else, sent after the job is done. How to ask customers for reviews has the wording for that half.
Want the other half handled? ReviewKit sends your review link to every customer after the job, and prints the card for the ones standing at your counter. No contract, cancel in one click. Start free.