Reviews are the first number we check.
We count your reviews, and the reviews of the two businesses ranking above you, before we plan anything else. What happens next depends on the answer. Behind them, and review work is month one while the technical list waits. Ahead of them, and we tell you so and spend the month where it will move something.
The businesses assistants name have the reviews.
Insites audited 10,000 US local businesses across ChatGPT and Perplexity against more than 200 marketing signals. The businesses those engines recommended averaged 133 Google reviews; the ones they never recommended averaged 11. That is a correlation from one study, so treat it as a direction rather than a formula.
Three separate pieces of evidence now point the same way, and the third is the one that decided our ordering. Ahrefs’ meta-analysis of 14 studies found close to no measured effect from schema on whether a business gets cited, Google has said publicly that it does not use llms.txt, and the same Insites audit put technical SEO, page speed and structured data among its weakest signals.
So a business near the bottom of that range gets review work in month one and the technical list waits its turn. A business already ahead of the two ranking above it gets told that, and the month goes somewhere else. Reviews are a free surface you control directly, and plenty of owners are already good at it, so this is a measurement before it is a recommendation.
A weekly ask, running all year.
Where the count says there is ground to make up, this is what runs. Reviews are a habit rather than a project, so the plan sets one up and keeps it going. You approve the replies; we do the rest.
- The ask goes to your happiest customers. We set up the request so it reaches the customer who has just had a good visit, while they still remember it.
- One or two a week, every week. A steady trickle builds a profile that keeps growing. A push builds a cluster of same-week reviews that reads as solicited.
- Every review gets a written reply. We write the reply and you approve it. The reply is written for the next customer reading the profile.
- Your count beside the two above you. We report your review count next to the two businesses ranking above you, so the number has something to mean.
Review work runs inside the ongoing plan, $400/mo. We write the replies and send them for your approval; nothing goes up on your profile that you have not read.
Questions about reviews.
- How many Google reviews does a local business need?
- There is no threshold that switches anything on. What the evidence supports is a direction: businesses AI assistants recommend hold far more reviews than businesses they never mention, so the number worth watching is your count against the two businesses ranking above you rather than against a target.
- Is it better to ask for reviews steadily or run a campaign?
- Steadily. A campaign produces a burst of reviews inside one week, which reads as solicited to a customer scrolling the profile and gives you nothing the following month. One or two a week compounds and looks like what it is.
- Should a business reply to negative reviews?
- Yes, and quickly. The reply is not written for the person who complained, it is written for the next customer reading the profile. A short reply that names what happened and what you did about it does more for that reader than the original review costs you.
Find out where your review count puts you.
The audit records your count and the counts of the two businesses ranking above you, then tells you where that puts you and what it changes about the plan.
Perth, Western Australia