Get chosen
Showing up puts you on the list. Reviews are what get you picked off it, and the number matters more than the average.
What this actually is
Someone comparing four businesses spends about two seconds on each. They are not reading your reviews. They are glancing at how many you have, because volume reads as 'lots of people have used these people and lived'.
Review count also feeds the map itself. A business with two hundred reviews and a 4.6 will usually beat one with nine reviews and a perfect five.
Almost every owner we talk to knows this and asks anyway — occasionally, awkwardly, when they remember, to the customers they liked most.
What we do about it
- ✓Set up a routine that asks every finished customer, not the ones you remember. Same wording, same timing, every time.
- ✓Put the review link where asking costs nobody anything: invoices, receipts, a card at the counter, the signature of your email.
- ✓Report the count every month so you can see the line move, rather than guessing.
How you know it's broken
- →You have been in business fifteen years and have eleven reviews.
- →Your last review was from 2023.
- →You get good ones in bursts, right after you remember to ask, then nothing for four months.
How the free check scores this
The checker reads your public review count and compares it to the businesses that come up alongside you, because forty reviews is thin in one category and strong in another. It deliberately does NOT score your star rating — that's about your work, not your visibility, and a stranger has no business grading it.
Check my score, freeEach one only pays off if the others work too, which is why we do all four.