Can You Show Only Positive Testimonials on Your Website?

Yes. Nothing in US law obliges you to publish every testimonial you receive, and a curated Wall of Love is a normal, lawful piece of marketing. What the FTC rule reaches is not the selection, it is the claim you make about the selection. If a page invites customer reviews and then implies that what it displays is most or all of what came in, while the low ratings sit in a folder somewhere, that is review suppression.

That is a much narrower rule than the panic on this topic suggests, and a much sharper one than "just show the good ones" implies. The distinction is worth ten minutes of your time, because the most common testimonial setup on the internet, a hand-picked wall next to an average star rating, sits directly on the line.

Can you show only positive testimonials on your website?

Yes, as long as your page does not represent that you are showing everything. A marketing page that says "here is what our customers say" and shows six quotes you chose is advertising, and advertisers have always been allowed to choose their own examples. You are not running a review platform. Nobody reasonably reads a landing page as a complete census of customer opinion.

The rule changes shape when your page starts behaving like a review platform: an open submission form, a running count, a star average, a "sorted by most recent" feed. At that point a visitor is entitled to read what they see as representative, and the 2024 FTC rule on consumer reviews and testimonials, codified at 16 CFR Part 465, has something specific to say about it.

What 16 CFR 465.7(b) actually says

Here is the operative text, which is short enough to read in full and rarely quoted accurately. Section 465.7(b) makes it a violation:

For a business to materially misrepresent, expressly or by implication, that the consumer reviews of one or more of the products or services it sells displayed in a portion of its website or platform dedicated in whole or in part to receiving and displaying consumer reviews represent most or all the reviews submitted to the website or platform when reviews are being suppressed (i.e., not displayable) based upon their ratings or their negative sentiment.

Four conditions have to line up before this bites, and most testimonial pages fail at least one of them, which is why most testimonial pages are fine:

The rule also names the grounds on which you may withhold a review without misrepresenting anything, provided you apply them the same way to every review regardless of what star it carries. Those are reviews containing trade secrets or privileged and confidential information, defamatory or abusive content, another person's private information, discriminatory content, or material that is clearly false or misleading; reviews the seller reasonably believes are fake; and reviews wholly unrelated to what the business offers.

Read that list again and notice what is not on it. "It was two stars" is not a neutral criterion. "The customer was unfair" is not a neutral criterion. Neutral means the rule you applied would have removed a five-star review just as readily.

Where the line actually falls

The useful way to think about this is not "am I allowed to curate" but "what is my page claiming". Here are the common setups, scored:

The recurring failure is the aggregate. Selection is defensible; arithmetic is not. The moment you compute a number from a filtered set and present it as the number, you have made a factual claim that is not true, and you have done it in a form a regulator can check with a calculator.

What about the star filter in my reviews widget?

Essentially every Google reviews widget on the market ships one, and the vendors document it openly. Elfsight, to take a widely used example, states in its own product documentation that you can show only positive feedback, such as 4 and 5 star reviews, and that you can exclude specific reviews by filtering out certain words or reviewer names. That is a normal feature request from customers and it is not a trick.

The tooling is not the defense, though. A setting in a vendor dashboard does not change what your page represents to a visitor, and the vendor is not the advertiser. If you turn on a 4-star-minimum filter and leave the widget's rating badge switched on, your site is now displaying a rating derived from reviews you chose. Turn off one or the other. Our comparison of the Elfsight widget and what it does and does not do goes through the rest of that product's tradeoffs, and the same caution applies to our own widgets.

There is one important carve-out worth knowing. Google reviews live on Google's platform, not yours, and the standard five-review widget most sites install does not let you pick which five appear. That is the safest arrangement available precisely because you have no editorial control over it. We worked through the Google-specific version of this question in can I use Google reviews on my website.

Do I have to publish a testimonial someone sent me?

No, and the question is usually the wrong way round. You do not have a duty to publish; you have a duty not to publish without permission. A customer who emails you a glowing paragraph has not licensed you to put their name and photo on your home page, which is why a written release matters more than most teams think, and why the testimonial release form is worth getting right before you need it.

Where people get into trouble is the opposite direction: publishing a testimonial that has been trimmed until it says something the customer did not. Under 16 CFR 255.1(b) an advertiser is responsible for the claims a testimonial conveys, and quotation marks assert that the words inside them are the words that were said. Cutting a qualifier, merging two answers, or fixing the grammar of a complaint into a compliment are all edits that change the claim. The full set of endorsement rules is in our guide to the FTC testimonial rules.

What to do with the negative ones instead

Filing them is a waste. A two-star testimonial is the only free, specific, unsolicited product research you will get this quarter, and hiding it does not make the underlying problem stop generating more of them.

Three things that actually work:

• Publish the mildly critical ones on purpose. A wall where every quote is ecstatic reads as fabricated, and buyers discount it accordingly. One quote that says "onboarding took us longer than we expected, but support stayed with us through it" does more for credibility than three more superlatives, and it pre-answers an objection your sales team is already hearing.
• Answer them where they were left. A review you hide from your own widget is still on Google, still on the app store listing, still in whatever forum thread a buyer reads next, which is why teams that take this seriously track what is being said about them across the web rather than curating one surface and assuming it is the only one that counts.
• Fix the thing and go back. Customers update reviews far more often than you would guess when someone tells them the issue is resolved. That is a better outcome than suppression on every axis, including the legal one.

A policy you can actually follow

1. Decide whether your page receives reviews or only displays them. If there is a submission form on the same page as the feed, you are in 465.7(b) territory. If the page only displays what you selected elsewhere, you are advertising.
2. Do not print an average or a total unless it covers everything. This single rule resolves most of the risk. If you want the badge, show the whole set.
3. Write down your exclusion criteria before you need them. Off-topic, abusive, contains someone's private information, suspected fake. Apply them to five-star reviews too, and keep a note of what you removed and why.
4. Never let a rating threshold be the criterion. That is the exact fact pattern the rule describes.
5. Keep the consent record with the words. Who said it, when, what they agreed to, and whether they approved the edited version. See how we capture consent at collection time.
6. Publish at least one honest reservation. Not as compliance theater, as conversion work. Your Wall of Love is more persuasive when it is not uniform.

The short version: choose your testimonials freely, describe them accurately, never derive a number from a filtered set, and keep the reason you left something out written down somewhere. Everything past that is marketing judgment, and the judgment that wins is usually less flattering than teams expect.