What is a good review response rate?

Most businesses that track this measure the wrong thing.

Overall response rate — the share of all reviews you replied to — can look excellent while you ignore every complaint. Reply to all forty of your five-star reviews and none of your six one-stars, and you post 87%. A reader looking at your profile sees something else entirely.

The number that matters

Critical response rate: the proportion of reviews at three stars or below that you answered.

This is the one worth putting on a wall. It is harder to game, it is what readers actually notice, and it is the difference between a business that uses reviews and one that markets with them.

A reasonable target is 90% or better. Below 50%, the pattern is visible to anyone reading the profile.

We publish both figures on every profile for exactly this reason. A business answering all its criticism and little of its praise looks considerably better than the reverse.

Rough benchmarks

Treat these as orientation rather than research. They reflect what a decent operator achieves rather than an industry average, which is dragged down by businesses doing nothing at all.

Overall response rate. Under 25% is neglect. 25–50% is typical and unremarkable. 50–80% is good. Above 80% is unusual and visible.

Critical response rate. Under 50% is a problem. 50–90% is normal. Above 90% is the standard worth holding.

Time to first reply. Within 24 hours is strong. Within 72 hours is fine. Beyond a week and the moment has passed — the reader assumes you saw it and had nothing to say.

Faster is not automatically better. A considered reply in two days beats a defensive one in two hours, and readers can tell the difference.

Measure the median, not the mean

An average response time is easily distorted. Reply to one review in ten minutes and three in a fortnight, and your mean looks respectable while your typical customer waits a fortnight.

Use the median: half your replies were faster, half slower. We compute and display the median for this reason, and label it as such on the profile.

What replying does and does not do

It does not improve your rating. Not here — replies carry no weight in the calculation, and cannot. A rating that could be moved by the business replying to itself would be a rating the business controls.

Be sceptical of any platform where responding lifts your score. That is a mechanism for selling engagement, not measuring quality.

It does change what readers conclude. A complaint with a substantive reply reads as a business that deals with problems. The same complaint unanswered reads as the only account of what happened.

It changes what you learn. Businesses that reply properly tend to notice patterns — the same complaint three times in a month — that businesses treating reviews as marketing never see.

A workable routine

Daily, five minutes: check for anything at three stars or below. Everything else can wait.

Twice weekly: clear the rest. A short reply to a positive review is worth writing; it need not be long.

Monthly: read your critical reviews together rather than one at a time. Individually they are incidents. Together they are usually a process problem.

Quarterly: check your critical response rate and your median time. If either has slipped, it slipped because nobody was looking.

One thing to stop doing

Replying to positive reviews faster than negative ones. It is human, it is very common, and it is legible to anyone reading the page. The timestamps are public.

If you can only answer some of your reviews, answer the complaints.