Google reviews for cafes: asked for at the counter, properly.

Cafe decisions are made in the moment, in the street, on a map, by somebody who is already hungry. They open the map, look at a rating and a photo, and walk into whichever one clears the bar.

That makes the rating do almost all of the work. Nobody reads twenty reviews of a cafe. They glance at the number, glance at whether it is recent, look at a photo of the food, and decide inside about ten seconds.

The threshold is unforgiving too. In a street with several options, the difference between a 4.3 and a 4.6 is the difference between being considered and being skipped, and neither number tells you anything real about the coffee.

Volume matters differently here than in a trade. A cafe with 600 reviews and a cafe with 90 both look established. What separates them is the rating and whether the last few are from this month.

The moment a customer is happiest is the moment they are leaving with a coffee in their hand, and there is a queue behind them. There is no counter conversation available and no follow-up email, because a cafe does not have anybody's email.

Every other local business has a record of the customer. A physio has a file, a plumber has an invoice, a real estate agent has a CRM. A cafe has a card payment and nothing else.

So the standard playbook does not apply. There is no message to send later, which means the ask has to happen physically, in the shop, without slowing the queue down.

What makes a cafe different from every other business here

• No contact details.

  You cannot follow up, because you have never had a way to. Whatever happens has to happen in the room.

• Enormous volume, tiny conversion.

  Hundreds of customers a week and a handful of reviews is normal. Small improvements in the ask compound fast.

• The unhappy ones are the motivated ones.

  A cold flat white produces a review far more reliably than a good one does, which is why unasked ratings drift down.

You can ask, you can put a sign up, and you can make it easy. You cannot give anybody a free coffee for it, you cannot ask only the customers who look pleased, and you cannot write them yourself.

The free coffee is the one every cafe reaches for and it is squarely against Google's policy. It also poisons the page: a run of reviews that all arrived in the same fortnight after a promotion is visible to anybody looking.

Staff writing them is the other common shortcut, usually with good intentions and usually from the same wifi. It is detectable, it gets the reviews removed, and it can take the profile with it.

The honest version is duller and works better. Ask everyone, make it take one tap, and accept that a small percentage will do it. A small percentage of a cafe's foot traffic is still a lot of reviews.

A card or a sticker at the point of payment with a code that opens the review box directly, and staff who mention it once while handing the coffee over. That is the entire mechanism, and the staff half is what makes it work.

The code on its own does very little. People do not scan things unprompted. The same card with one sentence from whoever is on the machine converts many times better, because the ask is human and the mechanism is instant.

What the sentence says matters less than that it is said at all, and that it is said to everybody rather than to the customers who smiled. Consistency is doing more work here than wording.

What the setup has to do

• Open the review box in one tap.

  Not the profile, not the website. Anything with a search step in it loses most people.

• Sit where the payment happens.

  It has to be in the hand or on the counter at the moment of paying, not on a wall by the door.

• Be asked out loud, to everybody.

  The sign is a reminder. The staff member is the ask, and without that half the sign does almost nothing.