How to get more Google reviews

The instinct is to treat reviews as a bank balance: get to a hundred, then relax. That instinct is wrong, and the survey data is unusually clear about why.

BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey for 2026 asked how old a review can be before people stop finding it relevant. 74 per cent look for reviews written within the last three months. 32 per cent narrow that to a fortnight. 18 per cent will only be swayed by something written in the last week. The same survey found 97 per cent read reviews before choosing a local business at all, and 41 per cent now say they always do, up from 29 per cent a year earlier.

Put those two findings together and the conclusion is uncomfortable. Nearly everyone reads reviews, and three quarters of them are effectively reading only the last quarter of yours. A business with 180 reviews, all more than a year old, is presenting almost nothing to most of the people deciding whether to call it.

This is the single most useful shift in thinking we can offer on the subject. Stop counting reviews and start counting reviews per month.

A rate is a much better target than a total, for three reasons. It is achievable this week rather than this year. It survives contact with a busy month, because two a week is a habit and two hundred is a project. And it keeps working: a business holding a steady rate is permanently visible in the window that matters, while a business with a big total is slowly disappearing from it.

Timing does more work here than wording. The gap between asking at the right moment and asking a week later is larger than the gap between a good message and a mediocre one.

On what to actually say: keep it short, make it specific, and do not script the customer. Naming the job ("the bathroom", "Tuesday's session") produces reviews that mention it, and specific reviews are both more persuasive and more useful for local relevance than five stars with no words.

Never suggest what to write or what rating to leave. Beyond the platform rules, a set of reviews that all use the same phrases is obvious to a reader and increasingly obvious to the platforms.

There is no universal winner here, and the honest answer is that it depends on how you already talk to customers. What matters far more than the channel is that the request goes out in the one they are already reading.

Whichever you choose, the link itself deserves five minutes of attention. Google provides a short review link from your business profile, and using it directly, rather than sending people to search for you, is the difference between most people finishing and most people abandoning.

If you want the profile itself in order before you start driving people to it, our guide to Google Business Profile optimisation covers the categories, fields and photos that decide what a visitor sees when they arrive.

Replies are the cheapest advantage available in this whole subject, because most businesses still do not do it. BrightLocal's 2024 survey found 88 per cent of consumers would use a business that replies to all of its reviews, against 47 per cent for one that never replies at all.

That gap is not really about the reviewer. Almost nobody rereads a reply to their own review. The audience is the next person, who is reading the whole page and forming a view about what you are like to deal with when something goes wrong.

For a negative review, the reply is a piece of writing for an audience of future customers, and it has three jobs: acknowledge the specific thing, say what you did about it, and move the argument offline. It does not have to concede that the customer was right.

What loses is arguing the facts in public, however satisfying it feels and however wrong they are. A reader cannot verify who is correct, so a long defensive reply reads as a business that is difficult, and that is the only impression that survives.

There is also a floor worth knowing about. 31 per cent of the same survey's respondents said they will only use a business rated 4.5 stars or higher, up from 17 per cent the year before. That threshold has been rising steadily, which means the cost of a run of poor reviews is higher than it used to be, and the fastest way back above it is a steady rate of new ones rather than a fight about the old.

Everything in this section is sold to Australian businesses regularly, and all of it is a bad trade.

The honest version of this work is slower and it is the only version that holds. It is also, in our experience, the part of local search that most businesses can do better than their competitors without spending anything, because the bar is genuinely low.

If you would rather have the asking, the replying and the profile handled for you alongside the rest of it, that is our local SEO service in Sydney. Because our Snowball SEO platform automates the audits, the tracking and the reporting that other agencies bill by the hour, more of the budget goes into the parts that actually move a local ranking. On how reviews sit alongside proximity and the rest of the signals, see how local SEO works in Sydney.