A business with four hundred glowing reviews, most of them written in 2023, is now at a disadvantage against a competitor with forty written last month.

That is the most useful finding in BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, published in February: 74% of consumers only consider reviews from the last three months. Nearly a third look at the last two weeks. Your review history still exists, but your customers have stopped reading it.

The same survey found something that changes local marketing more than any algorithm update this year. The share of people using ChatGPT or another AI tool for local recommendations rose from 6% to 45% in a single year. It is now the third most popular source people use to choose a local business.

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What local customers do now

• 97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses, and 41% always do.

  Up from 29% who always did in 2025. Reading reviews has gone from common to near universal.



• 31% will only use a business rated 4.5 stars or higher.

  Almost double the 17% from a year earlier. 68% now require at least four stars.



• 47% will not use a business with fewer than 20 reviews.

  A small but genuinely excellent business can be invisible simply because not enough people wrote something down.



• 89% expect the owner to respond to reviews, and 19% expect it the same day.

  Same-day expectation tripled from 6%. Half are put off by templated replies.



• Google's share fell from 83% to 71%.

  People now use an average of six review sources. Google still dominates, and it is no longer the only place your reputation is formed.

The survey is based on 1,002 US adults, so treat the exact percentages as directional for other markets. The behaviour it describes, people reading more reviews, more recent reviews, from more places, and increasingly through an AI summary, shows up wherever local search is measured.

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1. Complete your Google Business Profile like it is your homepage

For a local business it often is. Many customers will see your profile, your photos, your hours and your reviews without ever reaching your website.

Fill in every field: categories, services with descriptions, attributes, opening hours including holidays, booking and menu links, and a business description written for customers rather than keywords. Add real photos regularly, not just at setup. An incomplete profile tells a stranger nobody is paying attention.

2. Treat review recency as a weekly job

If three quarters of customers ignore anything older than three months, then your review profile decays whether you do anything wrong or not. A great 2024 does not protect you in 2027.

The fix is cadence rather than campaigns. A steady trickle of new reviews every week beats a burst of fifty after a push followed by six silent months. Put the request into an existing process, such as the receipt email, the follow-up message or the end of an appointment, so it happens without anyone remembering to do it.

3. Ask every customer, the same way, and never filter

The temptation is obvious: ask only the customers who seemed happy. Do not. The FTC's rule on consumer reviews, in force since October 2024, prohibits selectively suppressing negative reviews and paying or rewarding people for positive ones. Civil penalties were set at up to 51,744 dollars per violation when the rule was finalised.

Ask everyone, offer nothing in return for a particular sentiment, and make it easy with a direct link. If your service is genuinely good, the honest version produces the result you wanted anyway, without the legal exposure.

4. Get past twenty reviews before anything else

With 47% of consumers refusing to use a business with fewer than twenty reviews, that number works as a floor rather than a goal. Below it, a good rating may not be enough to get you considered.

If you are new or under that line, this is your single highest-priority marketing task. Ask your existing customers, including past ones you can still reach, and keep asking until you are comfortably past it.

5. Reply to every review, quickly and like a person

Eighty-nine percent of people expect a response, and half are put off by obvious templates. The reply is read by the next customer far more than by the reviewer.

Answer positive reviews briefly and specifically. Answer negative reviews calmly, without arguing, with an offer to fix the problem offline. Aim for a reply within a day where you can. A thoughtful reply to a two-star review often earns more trust than a dozen five-star ones.

6. Exist properly beyond Google

Google's share falling from 83% to 71% does not mean Google matters less. It means other places matter more, and that customers are cross-checking.

Claim and complete your profiles on the platforms that matter for your category: Apple Maps, Facebook, TripAdvisor for hospitality, industry directories for trades and professional services. Keep your name, address, phone number and hours identical on all of them, because inconsistency is both confusing to people and a signal of neglect to the systems summarising you.

7. Make your facts easy for an AI to repeat correctly

With 45% of people asking AI tools for local recommendations, and 82% reading AI-generated review summaries, you are increasingly described by something that never visited you.

Those tools draw on your profiles, your reviews and your website. Give them clear, consistent, specific facts to work with: what you do, where, for whom, what it costs, when you are open, and what makes you different, stated plainly in text. Vague marketing language gets summarised as vague. Specific claims supported by recent reviews get repeated.

8. Connect your website to your profile

Your website and your Business Profile should reinforce each other. Link the profile to a relevant page rather than only the homepage, add structured data for your business type and location, include your reviews or a link to them, and make sure booking or ordering works on a phone in two taps.

If you serve several areas or have several locations, each deserves its own page with genuinely specific content. A page for every suburb with the name swapped is the kind of thin content that no longer helps anyone.

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The ratchet nobody asked for

There is something uncomfortable in these numbers. The share of customers who will only consider a 4.5-star business nearly doubled in a year. Ratings have inflated across every platform, partly through genuine improvement and partly through years of fake and filtered reviews, and the honest businesses are the ones who pay for that inflation. A perfectly good 4.2-star restaurant is now quietly excluded by almost a third of potential customers.

That pressure is exactly what pushes businesses towards the shortcuts: buying reviews, only asking the happy customers, burying the critical ones. The shortcuts are now illegal in the US, increasingly detectable, and, as the survey shows, held in contempt by nearly everyone, with 97% saying businesses should face consequences for fake reviews.

The honest route is slower and more reliable: volume and recency. A business that steadily collects real reviews from every customer will see its average settle where its service actually is, with enough recent voices that one bad day does not define it. If that average is lower than you would like, the reviews are telling you something useful about the business, not the marketing.

The AI layer raises the stakes rather than changing the rules. A summary flattens nuance. It will repeat whatever your recent reviews say most often. Which means the most effective local marketing in 2027 is, unglamorously, doing the job well and making sure enough people say so.

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Three checks to run this week

• Count your reviews from the last 90 days.

  Not your total. That number, not the one on your profile, is what most customers are actually weighing.



• Ask an AI assistant to recommend a business like yours in your area.

  See whether you appear, what it says about you, and whether any of it is wrong.



• Check your hours, address and phone number on Google, Apple Maps and Facebook.

  If they disagree anywhere, fix it today. It takes ten minutes and it is the most common error we see.

Thirty minutes, no budget, and you will know exactly where your local reputation stands.

Want your profiles, reviews process and local pages working together? Talk to Spark about getting chosen by the customers already searching nearby.