The first question anyone asks about AI-written review replies is the right one: "so it just posts things in our name?" No. Nothing in GoCredible publishes without a person approving it. This article walks through exactly what that means in practice.
Step 1: the review arrives
Reviews from your connected sources land in one inbox, tagged with the location, the rating, and whether they are still unanswered. The inbox is sorted so the items that need attention first are at the top: low ratings, mentions of staff or safety, and reviews on locations that have gone quiet.
Step 2: a draft is prepared
For each review that needs a response, GoCredible prepares a draft reply. The draft is built from the review's actual content and your response guidelines: your tone, your sign-off, what you offer and what you never offer publicly. It is presented side by side with the original review, so the person reviewing it reads both together, the way a customer will.
A draft is a starting point, not a verdict. Some drafts go out unchanged, some get a line edited, and some get thrown away and rewritten, which is exactly how it should work.
Step 3: a person approves, edits, or escalates
Every draft waits for one of three decisions:
- Approve. The reply is published to the platform under your profile, and the review is marked answered.
- Edit, then approve. Changes are made inline; the edited version is what publishes. Edits also teach the system: consistent corrections tighten future drafts.
- Escalate. Some reviews are not a writing problem. A billing dispute, a staff complaint, a safety mention: these need action before words. Escalating assigns the review to a named owner as a follow-up, and the reply waits until the owner has the facts.
Who can approve is a permission, not a habit. You choose whether location managers approve their own replies, whether a regional lead signs off on low-rated reviews, and which categories always require escalation. The rules are yours; the system just enforces them.
Step 4: the record
Every published reply keeps its history: the original draft, who edited it, who approved it, and when it went out. When someone asks "who said that, and why," the answer is one click, not an archaeology project. The same record is what makes the weekly numbers honest: response rates and response times are computed from what actually happened, per location.
Why we built it this way
Fully automatic replying is technically easy and commercially tempting, and we chose not to build it. A public reply is your brand speaking, on the record, under a complaint. The cost of a bad automatic reply is much higher than the cost of a thirty-second approval, and the approval step is also where your team's judgment becomes part of the system rather than something the software works around.
Approval is a floor, not a ceiling: teams that trust their guidelines approve quickly from the phone, and teams in regulated industries route everything through a second reviewer. Both run on the same flow.
If you want to see the flow with your own locations' reviews, that is what the demo covers: the inbox, a draft, an approval, and an escalation, end to end.