Reviews older than three months stop counting
97% of people still read reviews. 74% only trust the ones written in the last three months. A five-star average from 2024 is not doing what you think it is.
The star rating is not the story anymore. The date is. BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey found that 97% of people use reviews to guide a decision and 92% care about the star rating, but 74% specifically look for reviews written within the previous three months. A hundred glowing reviews that all stop in March read like a business that stopped.
Recency is the new rating
Think about how you read reviews yourself. You scroll to the newest ones. If the newest one is from last winter, you wonder what happened. If the newest one is from Tuesday, you assume the business is busy and still good at it.
That is why the businesses that win locally are not the ones with the most reviews. They are the ones that keep getting reviews, steadily, a few every month, from real jobs.
Replies are being read too
The same survey found that slow or generic responses to reviews are increasingly read as a red flag. People expect the owner to acknowledge feedback quickly and in their own words. A pasted “Thank you for your feedback!” under every review is worse than silence, because it looks like nobody is home.
- Reply within a day. Two sentences, specific to the job, signed with your name.
- Reply to the bad ones first, calmly, with what you did about it. Future customers read those most carefully.
- Ask on the day you finish, while the customer is still looking at the result.
- Make the ask easy: a text with a direct link, not “find us on Google.”
The ninety-day loop
Here is the whole system: finish the job, text the customer a review link the same day, reply when the review lands, post the photo of the work to your profile. Four small moves per job. Do them for ninety days and your newest reviews are always from this month, which is the only month that counts.