Offering a discount, a free item, or any other reward in exchange for a review breaks Google's policies, full stop, regardless of how the offer is worded or whether the review has to be positive.
The short answer is no
Google explicitly prohibits incentivising reviews of any kind. This applies even if you offer the same incentive to every customer regardless of what they end up writing, and even if you never explicitly ask for a five star review. The presence of a reward attached to leaving a review at all is the part that breaks the rule.
Why Google treats this as a serious violation
The whole point of a review system is that it reflects genuine, unprompted opinion. The moment a reward is attached, that signal becomes unreliable, because some share of those reviews exist because of the incentive rather than the experience. Google's enforcement here is not subtle: businesses caught running incentivised review campaigns risk having the reviews removed and the business profile penalised.
What counts as an incentive
- A discount code or coupon offered specifically for leaving a review.
- A prize draw or giveaway entry tied to leaving a review.
- Free products or services offered in exchange for a review, even a balanced or honest one.
- Asking customers to leave a review and then separately rewarding them for it, even without stating it as a condition upfront.
What you can do instead
The compliant version of all of this is simply asking, with no reward attached, at the moment a customer is most likely to be genuinely satisfied. That is a less flashy approach than running an incentive campaign, but it is the only version that does not put your Google Business Profile at risk. Making the ask itself easier, a direct link, sent at the right moment, does far more for review volume than an incentive ever would, without any of the policy risk.