Picture this: You’re attending a networking event at a nice senior living community in February 2026. Mid-event, the sales director approaches you, shoves a tablet in your face, and requests a Google review. No tour. No experience with the community. No care questions. Yeah, thanks, just give us the Google Review, thanks, mmmkk.
No, thank you.
I’m writing about what won’t leave me alone – and this incident really won’t leave me alone.
I’m going to tell you a true story about something that happened to me recently at a senior living community-based networking event.
Can you sit with me for a moment? “Ryan… this story, your article, whatever – it’s so…long, really?”
I get it: I can be a little long-winded. But if you’ve been in the industry longer than I have, you’ll get it. It’s worth the read. I won’t let you down.
And if you’re in the healthcare and senior services industry now, and you want to vent to somebody who might understand and who’ll listen as long as you like – Ryan@RyanRMiner.com; we’ll talk as long as you want – completely “off the record,” as they say.
So here’s the story: In mid-February 2026, I walked into a senior-living-hosted networking event in Maryland. (The who, what, and where are immaterial to this story.)
Networking events in the older adult, healthcare, and senior services industries are frequent in most U.S. markets, at least they are where I live, in Maryland, in the Metro D.C. area.
You know these senior living event formats: sign-in sheet (sometimes), name tags (sometimes), food (sometimes great; sometimes awful), people that you know, but not really (you know these folks – because you’ve seen that guy whom you have no idea what he does, although he shows up to these events.)
You enter the room. Sometimes the room is much too hot, and sometimes it’s too cold.
Like-minded and equally glowing marketing professionals from home care agencies, home health companies, program managers, hospice, SNFs, care management companies, realtors, insurance agents, assisted living group home providers, durable medical equipment providers, and pharmacy services pack the sometimes too-small room.
(My sincere apologies for failing to include your industry.)
The community I was in in February is aesthetically pleasing, though I hadn’t previously toured it – not really, at least. I hadn’t truly seen the whole place, the vibe, the experience.
- I hadn’t met the community’s care team (because care teams change at senior living communities – sometimes frequently, sometimes infrequently).
- I hadn’t spoken with a single resident or family member (not in a long time).
- I hadn’t visited their memory care community, or a single dining room, nor have I witnessed any resident activities in progress.
- I hadn’t asked a registered nurse on site how they handle sundowning. I hadn’t watched a caregiver, a CNA, a med tech, interact with a resident.
I didn’t have a chance to get a feel for the place in total – its energy, its culture, its soul.
And then this happened: the community’s sales director approached me with a tablet, shoved it in my face, and asked me to leave a Google review.
A Google Review? Really? Let That Sink In
Before I had seen or even toured this senior living community, and before I had experienced anything worth reviewing.
And before I had any basis – any basis at all – for forming an opinion about the quality of care this community provides to older adults and their families, a sales professional asked me to endorse it on Google publicly.
Not after a tour.
Not after a conversation about their care philosophy – and not after meeting the director of nursing, the executive director, the activities coordinator, or anyone who actually touches the lives of the people who live there.
Before all of that.
At a networking event, with a tablet, walking from person to person, asking each networking event attendee in the room to tap out a five-star review for a community they couldn’t describe if someone asked them to.
I want to be very precise about what this is because the industry needs to hear it said plainly.
It’s not marketing – it’s manipulation, and it shouldn’t happen.
And it is being done in the name of people who deserve infinitely better.
What a Google Review Actually Is
Let’s talk about what a Google review represents – because I don’t think the person with the tablet understood it at the time.
A Google review is a public statement of trust. It’s a person putting their name – their reputation – behind a declaration that says, “I experienced this place, and I’m telling you it’s worthy of your consideration.”
When a daughter is up at midnight, crying, searching “assisted living near me” because her mother fell again and she knows she can’t do this alone anymore – she’s reading those reviews.
That daughter is reading every single review. She’s looking for something that tells her this place is safe, that this strange place her mother visited before and doesn’t know, will care for mom, with the mission of keeping and maintaining mom’s dignity, every single day.
It isn’t speculation.
According to industry reputation data from Caring.com and BrightLocal, 89% of consumers read online reviews for healthcare services before making a decision. A separate industry survey found that 87% of families say reviews directly influence whether they’ll even consider a community.”
Those numbers mean that nearly nine out of ten families are using Google reviews as a filter, not a supplement, to decide which communities deserve their attention and which ones get scrolled past at midnight.
That daughter is making the hardest decision of her life, partly based on what strangers wrote online.
And this senior living sales director wanted me, a total stranger, to contribute to that decision – to shape a daughter’s choice about where mom will live and be cared for, where mom could take her last breath, based on ten minutes inside a building where the only thing I experienced was a name tag and a cheese plate?
No, thank you.
And the fact that someone operating from a position of trust within a senior living community thought it was appropriate to ask is a problem that goes far deeper than one person with a tablet.
The Integrity Problem in Senior Services Marketing
I want to write fairly.
Maybe this senior living sales director was following a corporate directive in asking for Google reviews at a networking event.
Maybe the sales director’s regional director told her to collect twenty reviews this quarter, and didn’t explain the ethics of how to do it.
Or maybe nobody in her organization ever sat her down and said, “Here’s what a Google review actually represents to a family in crisis.”
I’m sure this particular sales director is a very good, very nice person – but she’s executing a horrific and unethical strategy that someone above her designed.
Of course, I give grace – because I would want it, too. I don’t always deserve grace professionally and personally, but the people who cared about me gave it to me anyway, probably when I deserved grace the least.
But the reason doesn’t change the result.
Here’s what the senior living sales director’s request communicated, whether the director of sales intended it or not:
- It communicated that the community she’s employed by values its Google rating more than the integrity of the reviews that comprise it.
- It communicated that the number might matter more than the truth behind the number.
- It communicated that the organizers viewed the evening’s networking attendees not as partners to be respected but as instruments to be used. They treated these professionals as warm bodies with Google accounts to mine for stars, just as a community might mine a vendor for a discount.
- It communicated that something needs to change in this industry. Now.
And here’s the part about that particular experience that keeps me up at night: if asking for Google reviews from complete, total strangers is how this senior living community approaches their public reputation – if they’re willing to fabricate the appearance of trust rather than earn it – what does that tell me about how they approach care?
I don’t know the answer to that question. Maybe the care is exceptional. I can’t imagine the nurses are anything but extraordinary. Maybe the residents are thriving. I genuinely hope so.
And I want to be precise here: a community’s marketing practices and its clinical care are different operations, often run by different people with different values. The care team inside that building may be doing sacred, beautiful work every single day, while the sales team out front is undermining the senior living community’s credibility without realizing it.
But here’s what I do know: the question shouldn’t exist in a family’s mind.
And the moment you solicit a review you haven’t earned, you create the conditions for that question to be asked. Not by me – by the families who eventually discover that the glowing Google reviews are nonsense.
Nobody showed me the care in this community. The sales director offered, in fairness, that night – but that night wasn’t good for me.
Nobody told me about the care, and nobody introduced me to the people who do the work.
Instead, a senior living sales director handed me a tablet – literally shoved it in my face – and asked me to tell the internet that this place is worth trusting.
The irony would be funny if it weren’t so egregious – and dangerous.
Does the Appearance of Quality Matter More Than Actual Care?
I’m not writing to embarrass one individual; that’s unnecessary and unwarranted.
I’m writing this because the tablet transactional incident is a symptom of something systemic. My experience in mid-February wasn’t the first time I’d seen the senior services and older adult industry prioritize optics over substance.
I just so happened to witness a naked version of everything that’s wrong with the industry on that particular day in February.
I’ve watched senior living communities measure success by tour counts instead of move-in quality. And I’ve even watched marketing teams celebrate LinkedIn impressions that produced zero referrals.
I’ve watched regional directors demand activity logs full of events attended while never once asking whether those events generated a single family conversation. The tablet was the logical endpoint of a culture that has been chasing the appearance of results for years.
The senior services industry is obsessed with metrics it doesn’t understand:
- Google reviews.
- Star ratings.
- LinkedIn impressions.
- Event attendance numbers.
- Tour counts.
- Brochure pickups.
All of it measured, all of it tracked, all of it reported to regional directors and corporate offices as evidence of marketing activity.
And almost none of it measures the thing that actually matters: Does a family trust you enough to give you their mother, their grandmother?
That’s the only metric. That’s the business.
Everything else is theater.
When a senior living community chases Google reviews the way this one did – not by earning them through extraordinary care provided, but by cheaply soliciting online reviews from professionals who haven’t witnessed a single moment of the care they suggest warrants five stars – they’re telling you exactly where their priorities are.
Yeah, they’re telling you that the appearance of quality matters more than the reality of quality, and they’re telling you that the scoreboard matters maybe more than the game.
And the families who read those Google reviews when they desperately rush to Google searching for “memory care near me,” shortly after a hospital social worker explains that, unfortunately, mom cannot live by herself any longer, now with this and the other incident with this stove?
Should senior living communities expect prospective families to discern the difference between a review from a daughter whose mother lived there for three years while the staff treated her with dignity every single day, and a review from someone who accepted a tablet from a sales director at an evening networking event because they did not know how to say no?
Those Google reviews sit side by side on the same page, carrying the same weight, shaping the same decisions.
That should horrify everyone in this industry.
The Question I Wanted to Ask The Senior Living Sales Director That Evening
I didn’t leave a review that evening, nor did I make a scene when confronted with an iPad in my face. That’s not me.
I didn’t lecture – because I hate that. I thanked the sales director and politely declined. I moved about my business and struck up a conversation with another event attendee.
But there’s a question I wanted to ask the sales director – but I’ll ask it here instead:
If your community is good enough to deserve five stars, why are you asking strangers to say so?
If the care is exceptional, the reviews will come – I promise. It’s not magic; it’s human beings experiencing harmony and sharing their experience with the world.
Google reviews will come from a daughter who watched an assisted living care team navigate her father’s transition with grace.
They’ll come from a grandson who called the front desk at his grandmother’s memory care community at midnight, and the person who answered the phone will have said, “Hold on, Honey.” And you’d hear the nurse say, “She’s hanging in there.” And that’s all you needed in that moment.
They’ll come from the spouse who sat in your dining room every evening for three years and was greeted by name every single time.
The staff earns those reviews.
They are real reviews, authentic experiences; they carry weight because they come from people who experienced something worth describing.
Let me clarify: I’m not saying a senior living community shouldn’t ask for reviews. But they have an opportunity to ask for review from the people who matter the most – the ones with the real stories.
- Ask a daughter whose mother has lived in the community for two years and who watched your team navigate the hardest transition of her family’s life with grace.
- Ask the son who called the front desk at midnight; someone actually answered and helped.
- Ask the residents.
- Ask the families.
- Ask the people who know – who have truly seen the care firsthand, up close, personally, intimately, and felt the care, trusted the care, and can describe it because they lived it.
But please don’t ask the networking event attendee you’ve never met before; we haven’t earned the right to review somebody else’s home. It’s not a review. That’s a fabrication wearing a five-star costume.
When you solicit reviews from strangers who came from your food instead of your care, you’re not supplementing that organic trust – you’re diluting it.
You’re polluting the very system that families depend on to make informed decisions, and you’re injecting noise into a signal that people rely on during the most vulnerable moments of their lives.
And for what?
A bump from 4.2 to 4.4 stars?
That’s cheap. It’s sleazy. And it’s lazy. Don’t do it.
And my grandparents – Dick and Maureen Hann, Scotty Miner, and my surviving grandmother, Joyce Miner – they would have hated that approach.
That style of business dishonors my grandparents’ generation, and I’m not going to stay quiet about it.
Is a phony Google review really worth your integrity?
Is it worth the trust of every family that reads those reviews and believes them?
The People Behind the Google Reviews Deserve Better Than Phony Ones
I’ve written before that this industry is sacred work. I believe that.
Caring for older adults – the generation that built this country, that sent us to the moon, that raised the people who raised us – is not a job – it’s a privilege.
That privilege demands a standard of honesty and dignity that most industries never have to consider.
When you work in senior services, you are asking families to inherently trust you with the person they love most in this world.
That’s the transaction.
It’s not a tour.
It’s not a star rating.
And it’s not a brochure.
It’s trust – thet kind of trust that means a daughter can sleep at night because she believes, because you showed her, because you proved it, because you earned it, that her mother is safe.
A senior living sales director who walks around a networking event with a tablet soliciting Google reviews from people who haven’t witnessed a single moment of care seemingly doesn’t understand this or hasn’t experienced it personally.
What senior living truly sells is a promise – a promise that says: We will take care of your person the way you would if you could be here every moment of every day.
A tablet and a five-star tap cannot manufacture that promise.
That promise is earned in hallways at three o’clock in the morning, when nobody is watching, when there’s no selfie to take and no LinkedIn post to write and no Google review to solicit.
That promise is earned by the CNA who notices that a resident hasn’t eaten, by the nurse who calls the family before the family has to call, by the caregiver who remembers Maureen Hann, my late grandmother, who resided in memory care for a year and a half before she took her last breath.
It’s a hospital staff, an SNF staff, your memory care community, the hospice team pulling up the palliative care cart to the hospital room at Meritus because food is a universal comfort when somebody you’ve loved for 39 years is about to depart this world.
Kimberly, my world, my wife – she knew I ate the majority of the cookies from the Sarasota hospital’s palliative care cart. She and I both ate cookies.
We ate cookies as Kimberly held her mother Leslie’s hand in a Sarasota hospital room, knowing that hospice was the most decent thing she could do next after Leslie suffered an unexpected heart attack the day before Mother’s Day in 2024.
“Not I lay me down to sleep” is how every night ended for my mom and my grandmother, Maureen, in the last year and a half of my grandmother’s life.
And my grandmother’s memory caregiving staff – the CNAs who do it and see it all – knew to check on my grandmother after mom left her room, after their nightly prayers.
That’s what earns a five-star review.
Don’t cheapen families and their personal experiences for a bump in the online ratings. It’s never worth it.
Standards That We Stick To
I’ll end with this.
First, here is Google’s policy about fake Google reviews; they’re serious about it: https://support.google.com/contributionpolicy/answer/7400114?hl=en
Second, my late grandmother, Maureen, spent her final chapter in a memory care community. She died on Wednesday, July 16, 2025.
My family’s experience with senior living is not theoretical. It’s personal. It’s raw. It’s ongoing.
When I evaluate a senior living community – when I walk through the doors and decide whether this is a place I would trust with someone I love – I’m not looking at the model apartment.
I’m not counting the stars on Google. I’m watching the staff. I’m listening to the tone of their voices. I’m noticing whether the caregiver in the hallway makes eye contact with the resident in the wheelchair or walks past as if the resident were furniture.
The reviews will write themselves.
Hi, I’m Ryan Miner. I write about human beings experiencing life, small-business marketing, artificial intelligence, healthcare, behavioral psychology, branding, marketing, and what actually makes businesses work. I founded Sentinel Silver and The Senior Soup. Email me at Ryan@RyanRMiner.com; text or call me at (240) 244-7075.
