TRM Research · The Guides
TRM Research — Review Guide
How often local businesses answer their reviews, and how soon.
Most of the Google reviews in this study got an owner reply, but few got one the same week. Of 46,771 recent reviews of 986 local service businesses, 58.9% received a reply and 12.0% received one within seven days. Unhappy reviews were answered less often, and less quickly, than happy ones.
Six findings
Each finding below is written to stand on its own, with the number of reviews or businesses behind it.
Of 46,771 recent Google reviews of 986 local service businesses, 58.9% received an owner reply, and 12.0% received one within seven days.
Counting only reviews at least 30 days old, 56.7% had a reply. Counting only reviews at least seven days old, 10.1% were answered within seven days.
Across the 25,904 replies with a measurable wait, the median wait was 27 days, and 46.6% of replies came more than 30 days after the review.
A quarter of replies took longer than 142 days.
Unhappy reviews were answered less often, and less quickly, than happy ones.
Of 5,668 one- and two-star reviews, 48.4% received a reply and 7.0% received one within seven days. Of 40,596 four- and five-star reviews, 60.5% received a reply and 12.8% within seven days.
Three-star reviews were the least answered of all: 43.8% of 507 received a reply, after a median of 37 days.
One- and two-star reviews, by comparison, received a reply 48.4% of the time.
Practice varied widely from one business to the next: 39.7% of the 986 businesses replied to 90% or more of their recent reviews, while 11.7% replied to none.
The trades themselves sit within 14 points of each other on replies. Within every trade, some businesses answered nearly every review and others answered none.
The trade that replied most often replied most slowly: general contractors answered 66.0% of 8,916 reviews, after a median of 94 days, while car dealers answered 52.6% of 9,760, after a median of 14 days.
How often a business replies and how soon it replies are two different habits. The tables below show both for each trade.
By trade
| Trade | Businesses | Reviews | Replied | Within 7 days | Median wait |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Car dealers | 199 | 9,760 | 52.6% | 18.6% | 14 days |
| Car repair shops | 196 | 9,599 | 58.4% | 16.7% | 17 days |
| General contractors | 198 | 8,916 | 66.0% | 5.7% | 94 days |
| HVAC contractors | 199 | 9,532 | 63.2% | 11.3% | 27 days |
| Property management companies | 194 | 8,964 | 54.5% | 6.7% | 44 days |
Median wait counts only reviews that received a reply. Days are rounded to the nearest whole day.
| Trade | Replied to 90% or more | Replied to none |
|---|---|---|
| Car dealers | 38.2% | 16.6% |
| Car repair shops | 42.3% | 11.7% |
| General contractors | 43.9% | 9.1% |
| HVAC contractors | 42.2% | 11.1% |
| Property management companies | 31.4% | 9.8% |
By star rating
| Review | Reviews | Replied | Within 7 days | Median wait |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| or | 5,668 | 48.4% | 7.0% | 31 days |
| 507 | 43.8% | 5.3% | 37 days | |
| or | 40,596 | 60.5% | 12.8% | 26 days |
| or | or | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trade | Reviews | Replied | Within 7 days | Reviews | Replied | Within 7 days |
| Car dealers | 1,198 | 48.5% | 10.8% | 8,476 | 53.2% | 19.8% |
| Car repair shops | 1,333 | 50.7% | 9.1% | 8,103 | 60.1% | 18.2% |
| General contractors | 420 | 39.5% | 1.9% | 8,456 | 67.5% | 5.9% |
| HVAC contractors | 554 | 49.5% | 7.9% | 8,926 | 64.0% | 11.5% |
| Property management companies | 2,163 | 48.4% | 4.4% | 6,635 | 56.9% | 7.6% |
In every trade, a one- or two-star review was less likely to get a reply, and less likely to get one within a week, than a four- or five-star review.
For your own replies
A reply appears in public, under the review. The reviewer reads it once. Everyone deciding whether to choose you can read it after that, including the reply that never came.
This study measures a practice, not an outcome. It counts how often and how soon businesses answer what customers already wrote. It makes no claim that replying brings more reviews or better ones. What it shows is how uneven the practice is: every trade studied holds businesses that answer nearly every review and businesses that answer none.
Response from the owner
The customer experience is your message; the internet is where it’s amplified. If you don’t influence the narrative, someone else will.
Three habits answer what the data shows:
Answer every review, not only the easy ones
The reviews most often left without a reply were the one-, two- and three-star reviews. They are also the reviews where a reply has the most to answer.
Answer within the week
Take a day to check the facts, then reply. In this study, only 12.0% of reviews received a reply within seven days.
Make it the same practice for everyone
A reply that depends on who is on shift, or on how the review felt to read, is not a practice yet. The same steps, every review, every time.
The full method for writing those replies, with three sample replies to adapt, is in the guide: How to respond to negative Google reviews.
How the study was done
The question
How often, and how soon, do local service businesses reply to their public Google reviews, by trade and by star rating?
The sample
Five trades: car repair shops, HVAC contractors, general contractors, car dealers and property management companies. For each trade, 20 businesses in each of ten large US metro areas, chosen from Google business listings that were claimed by their owner and carried 30 or more reviews, in the listing source’s own order, which does not sort by rating. Businesses that appeared in more than one area were counted once. 1,000 businesses were selected and 986 were analyzed: 5 returned no reviews and 9 could not be retrieved.
The reviews
Each business’s 50 newest Google reviews, or all of them where it had fewer: 46,771 reviews in total. 227 businesses had fewer than 50.
What counts
A review counts as replied when an owner reply is present. The wait is the time from the review to the owner’s reply. Where an owner reply carries an earlier date than its review, which most likely means the review text is newer than the reply, the review counts as replied but is left out of every wait and within-seven-days figure, so those figures are, if anything, conservative. That applies to 1,638 replies; 25,904 replies have a measurable wait.
The source
Google review and business listing data for US English listings within 25 km of each metro center, retrieved on October 30, 2026 through DataForSEO, a commercial data provider. The study reports aggregates only. No business, reviewer or city is named, no review text is published, and the raw data was deleted once the aggregates were checked.
Limits
- A sample, not a census: claimed listings with 30 or more reviews in ten large US metro areas. It does not describe unclaimed listings, very small businesses or rural areas.
- A recent window of practice, not a lifetime record: each business’s 50 newest reviews.
- Newer reviews have had less time to be answered. The figures for reviews at least 7 and at least 30 days old, in finding one, reduce that effect but do not remove it.
- A reply date can reflect a later edit of the reply, which would make some waits look longer than they were.
- An early partial read of the same data gave different trade figures from the full sample. Only full-sample figures appear here.
- Review-level percentages pool all reviews, so businesses that returned the full 50 weigh more than those with fewer.
- The figures are descriptive. No confidence intervals or significance tests were run, and differences of a point or two between groups should not be read as real.
- Results by metro area were measured and are not published, so no city is singled out.
How to cite this study
The Reciprocity Method™. “TRM Research — Review Guide: How Often and How Soon Local Businesses Answer Google Reviews.” Data read October 30, 2026. https://www.reciprocitymethod.com/trm-research-review-guide
Research FAQ
Questions?
How many Google reviews get a reply from the business?
In this study, 58.9% of 46,771 recent Google reviews of 986 local service businesses received an owner reply. Counting only reviews at least 30 days old, 56.7% did.
How long do businesses take to reply to Google reviews?
When a reply came, the median wait was 27 days. Only 12.0% of reviews received a reply within seven days, and 46.6% of replies came more than 30 days after the review.
Do businesses reply to bad reviews more than good ones?
No, the reverse. One- and two-star reviews received a reply 48.4% of the time, against 60.5% for four- and five-star reviews, and they were answered within a week about half as often.
Does replying to reviews bring more reviews?
This study does not measure that, and makes no such claim. It measures how often and how soon businesses answer the reviews they already have.
Can I use these figures?
Yes. Quote any finding with its number and cite the study as shown above, with a link to this page so readers can see the method and its limits.
Where to go next.
The numbers describe a practice. The guides show how to run it, every review, every time.
The Guides
Answer every review, good and bad.
Who your reply is really for, the steps for a hard review, and three sample replies to adapt.
Read the Guide
FreeThe Diagnostic
Know where you stand.
Ten questions: your practice stage, your weakest habit and your next step.
Take the Diagnostic
How it works
Four moves, every customer, every day.
Trust, listen, identify, solve.
See How It Works
The Guides
Invite every customer, the same way.
Ask every customer the same way, right after your team’s best care, without pressure.
Read the Guide
The Guides
Settle every complaint.
Treat every complaint as a burden to share: six steps, a sample reply, and how to stay calm with difficult customers.
Read the Guide
The Frontline Phrase System
The right words before the review.
A reply handles the review. These nine cards handle the moments that come before it, from the bad-news conversation to the graceful goodbye, each with what not to say and what to say instead.
See the Frontline cards
FreeStep One
Why counting reviews costs you reviews.
When reviews become the target, the ask drifts toward the customers likeliest to praise and away from everyone else. Step One of the Ten Steps shows what to measure instead, free and in full.
Read Step One
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