Review velocity is the rate at which new reviews arrive, rather than how many you have collected in total. A business earning a handful every month has velocity. A business with four hundred reviews, nearly all from three years ago, has a large number and none at all. Both Google and the person choosing who to call pay attention to the difference.
Briefly explained
- The pace of new reviews, not the total.
- Recency is read as evidence about the business that exists today.
- A steady trickle reads as real. Forty in one week reads as something else.
- Gating, buying and incentives all breach the rules, and the cleanup costs more than the reviews were worth.
What does velocity actually measure?
It measures three things at once, which is what makes it more useful than the total.
- Rate: How many arrive in a month, compared with the businesses you compete against rather than with your own last year.
- Recency: How long ago the most recent one landed.
- Steadiness: Whether the flow holds through a quiet season or stops with it.
Why does recency beat the total?
Because both audiences read it as evidence about now.
A customer comparing two companies treats last month’s review as a description of the business they would be hiring, and a three-year-old review as history. They are right to. Staff change, owners sell, standards move.
Google treats it similarly. Reviews feed the prominence side of local ranking, and Local Services Ads use review score and count directly. A profile that stopped collecting looks like a business that stopped trading.
How do you keep the flow going?
The mechanics matter more than the intention. Nearly every business means to ask and nearly none do it reliably by hand.
- Ask after every completed job, not when someone remembers.
- Ask at the moment the work is finished and the customer is pleased, not days later from the office.
- Ask through the channel they already use. For most of them that is a text with a direct link.
- Make it one tap. Every extra step loses a share of the people who meant to help you.
- Reply to all of them, including the short five-star ones. The habit is what the next reader sees.
What breaks the rules?
The same practices keep appearing, and every one of them is expensive.
- Gating: Screening customers and only sending the happy ones to the review link. Against Google’s policies and against FTC guidance on endorsements.
- Buying: Purchased reviews are detected in bulk and removed in bulk, usually along with the ones you earned.
- Incentives: A discount or a gift card for leaving a review breaches platform rules even when you do not ask for a good one.
The downside is not only removal. A review profile that has been cleaned out once is harder to rebuild than one that was slow and honest from the start.
What do the terms mean?
- Velocity: The rate new reviews arrive.
- Gating: Filtering who gets asked, based on how happy they seem.
- Response rate: The share of reviews you have replied to. Visible to anyone reading.
- Review request: The message that carries the link. Usually a text.
- Prominence: The part of local ranking that reviews feed, alongside citations and links.
What should you check every month?
- How many arrived, against the same month last year
- Whether anything is unanswered
- Whether the ask is actually firing after every job, or quietly failing
- What the critical ones have in common, which is usually more useful than the rating itself
Owner questions
