Tap-to-Review Reputation Engine

01 · SITUATION

Merchants know reviews decide their Maps ranking, and most 'review funnels' on the market quietly filter unhappy customers away from Google — which is review gating, and the FTC fines for it. The brief: make leaving a review effortless and make compliance a property of the architecture, not a policy document.

02 · SYSTEM

NFC pucks and QR stands at the counter resolve through a meridian.tips/r/{slug} redirect layer straight to the merchant's public review page. Every tap goes to the same destination regardless of sentiment — there is no pre-screening step to abuse. The redirect layer gives per-location analytics: taps, time-of-day, velocity.

03 · RESULT

Review velocity became a number merchants watch weekly, and the compliance story is one sentence long: gating is impossible because the system has nowhere to gate. The architecture is now the reference implementation for the T1-04 Reputation Engine service.