What is the best way to respond to negative reviews?

The most useful frame for a negative review is that the response is written for the next reader, not the person who left it. That dictates the tone: calm acknowledgment, factual context where the review is wrong or incomplete, and a genuine offer to resolve the matter offline. The offline move matters because it pulls the heat out of the public thread without trying to litigate in it. Where a review breaks platform policy – it is fake, it comes from a competitor, it discloses confidential information, it contains slurs – report it through the platform process rather than arguing with it publicly. The error to avoid is escalation: a defensive or combative reply generates engagement, which raises the review’s visibility and can pull it into AI summaries. A measured response that a reasonable future customer reads as professional does more for reputation than winning the argument.