Deliverability · Sept 8, 2026 · 6 min · By Ashland
They are not arriving. Nothing errors, the dashboard says sent, and the response rate sits at two percent. Here's what's eating them.
The frustrating thing about SMS filtering is that it's silent. A carrier that decides your message looks like spam doesn't bounce it back. It accepts it, reports it as delivered to whoever sent it, and drops it before it reaches the handset. Your software shows a green checkmark. Your customer's phone never buzzes.
So the symptom looks like indifference — "people just don't leave reviews anymore" — when the actual problem is that most of them never got asked.
Four causes, roughly in order of how often they're the culprit.
This is the big one, and it's the easiest to fix.
Public shorteners — bit.ly, tinyurl, anything shared across thousands of unrelated senders — are heavily filtered by US carriers, for the obvious reason that they hide the destination and phishing campaigns love them. Your perfectly legitimate review link inherits the reputation of everything else that ever went through that domain.
The fix is a branded link on a domain tied to your own business: rays-hvac.reviews/d8f2 rather than bit.ly/3xK9pQ. Same length, same tap, and it isn't carrying anyone else's history. It also reads as legitimate to the customer, which matters at least as much — people don't click shortened links from numbers they don't recognize.
Some vendors still default to a public shortener because it's free. If your review texts run through one, that alone can account for most of your missing responses.
If you send automated messages from a normal ten-digit number, US carriers require that number to be registered — your business as a "brand," your messaging as a "campaign." This has been mandatory for years now. Unregistered traffic isn't merely throttled; it gets filtered aggressively or blocked outright.
Two ways this bites people who are registered:
Ask whoever runs your messaging for your campaign registration status in writing. "We handle that" isn't a status.
Every automated message needs a clear way out. "Reply STOP to opt out" belongs in your messages, the opt-out has to actually work, and it has to be permanent — not "we'll take you off this list."
Leaving it off looks like evasion to a carrier filter, and honoring it badly is worse than not having it. A customer who replies STOP and gets another message in three days is one who reports you as spam, and enough of those poisons the number for everyone you're trying to reach.
There's a self-interested reason to be generous about it too: a customer who opts out of your review requests still uses you. Don't trade a repeat client for a star.
Messages from a number the customer has no relationship with, with no name attached, about a job they may have already mentally filed away, get read as spam by humans before any filter is involved.
What helps: sending from a number in your own area code, naming your business in the first six words, and referencing something only the real business would know — the job, the date, the technician who was there. Not because it games a filter, but because it's the difference between a message that gets read and one that gets swiped away.
A thirty-second diagnostic
Send yourself a request through your current system, from a phone number that isn't already in your own contacts. Then send it to two employees on different carriers — one Verizon, one T-Mobile or AT&T. If it lands on one and not the others, you're being filtered, not ignored. That's a fixable problem and it's usually the shortener.
None of this is exotic. It's the baseline, and the reason it's worth writing down is that a surprising number of businesses are paying monthly for a system that fails two or three of these lines and reports 100% delivery while doing it.
How we handle it
Every Praise Picker client gets a branded review link on their own subdomain, a registered sending number, and STOP handled permanently in software rather than by somebody remembering. The rest of the setup is here.
We'll run the diagnostic above with you on the phone and tell you which of the four it is.
