Google review statistics: what 306,017 local reviews show (2026)

One review in 18 on a local business’s Google profile is one-star. That is the main result from 306,017 live Google reviews on 1,106 Google Business Profiles that TrustReviews monitors, read on 4 October 2026. The reviews were published between August 2005 and October 2026.

Every profile belongs to a business that connected it to our review monitoring, which means the business came to a review removal company. The sample is therefore not a random sample of Google. The Method section at the end defines each measure and lists the limits of the data.

Key findings

1. One Google review in 18 is one-star (5.6%), and 87.8% are five-star. The one-star share stayed between 5.6% and 7.2% in every year from 2014 to 2026.
2. The median profile has 121 reviews, a 4.75 average, 7 reviews at one to three stars and 5 one-star reviews. 11.5% of profiles have no one-star review.
3. One-star reviews are 2.6 times longer than five-star reviews, and owners reply to fewer of them: 45% against 54%.
4. 36% of new one- and two-star reviews arrive within 48 hours of another one on the same profile.
5. Negative reviewers are local. Of 21,500 people who left a one- or two-star review, 12 reviewed more than one of our client businesses.
6. 7,052 reviews of every star rating disappeared from the profiles with no removal case of ours. 50 profiles held 62% of the five-star losses.
7. Of 1,170 Google reviews that came down after we filed them, 86.6% were one-star and 1 in 3 was more than a year old when we filed it.

What percentage of Google reviews are one-star?

On the profiles we monitor, 5.6% of Google reviews are one-star, about 1 in 18. Five-star reviews are 87.8%. Two-, three- and four-star reviews are each a small share, so most reviews sit at one end of the scale or the other.

The one-star share has barely changed in ten years. In each year from 2014 to 2026, one-star reviews were between 5.6% and 7.2% of the reviews published that year. Over the same period the number of reviews grew 4.9 times, from 15,167 published in 2019 to 74,250 published in 2025.

Older years can undercount one-star reviews. A review that Google or its author deleted before our first read of a profile is not in the data.

What to do with it

• Do not aim for zero one-star reviews. A few are normal, and only 11.5% of the profiles we monitor have none.
• Work out your own one-star share: divide your one-star reviews by your total reviews. Compare it with 5.6%.
• If your share is well above 5.6%, read your one-star reviews in date order. Look for a cause you can fix, a group posted close together, or reviews that break Google’s review policy.

Customers notice the average. In BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, a panel of 1,002 US adults, 68% said they will only use a business with four stars or more, and 31% only a business with 4.5 stars or more.

How many negative reviews is normal on a Google profile?

On the median profile in our data, 7 of 121 reviews are rated one to three stars, and 5 are one-star. Half of all profiles have between 2 and 19 reviews at three stars or below. On the average profile, 10.2% of reviews are one to three stars.

Read the percentiles as a ranking. About one profile in four has 19 or more reviews at three stars or below, and about one in ten has 57 or more. A count means more next to the profile’s total, so compare your share as well as your count.

The average Google rating of the median profile is 4.75. This is the middle value of each profile’s own average rating, not the average of all 306,017 reviews taken together.

What to do with it

• Count your reviews at three stars or below and find your place in the table.
• If you are above the 75th percentile, check each of those reviews against Google’s policy. Report the ones that break it, using the steps in how to remove a Google review.
• Reply to the rest. A review that does not break the policy usually stays up.
• If you connect your Google Business Profile to our review monitoring, the TrustOS portal reads every review at once and shows each one rated 3 stars or less, so you get your own count without counting by hand.

One-star reviews are longer, and get fewer replies

The median one-star review is 315 characters long. The median five-star review is 119 characters. So one-star reviews are 2.6 times longer: customers who give one star explain why in more detail. Owners reply to 44.6% of one-star reviews and to 54.3% of five-star reviews.

Rating-only reviews occur at every level. 13.8% of one-star reviews have no text, and four-star reviews are the most often blank, at 37.8%. Our guide to one-star reviews with no text covers what an owner can do about them.

What to do with it

• Reply to one-star reviews first. They carry the most text for a reader to weigh, and owners skip them more often than five-star reviews.
• Keep each reply short and factual. Our guide on how to respond to negative reviews includes the legal limits on replies for medical, dental and legal businesses.
• A reply does not stop you reporting a review that breaks policy. 36.8% of the removed reviews described below had an owner reply. See what if I replied to the review.

Replies matter to customers. In the BrightLocal survey, 80% of consumers said they are likely to use a business that responds to all of its reviews.

Negative reviews arrive close together

Our monitoring saw 1,304 one- and two-star reviews within 3 days of their posting, on 406 profiles, between 15 March and 4 October 2026. Of these, 464 (36%) arrived within 48 hours of another one- or two-star review on the same profile. 140 (11%) arrived on a day when that profile got 3 or more. The most on one profile in one day was 6.

This measure has a limit. We did not compute how often reviews would fall within 48 hours of each other by chance, and a busy profile gets more reviews close together for that reason alone. Read 36% as how often it happens, not as proof that a group of reviews is an attack.

We used only reviews seen within 3 days of posting because Google shows older reviews with a relative date such as “a year ago”. Those dates put dozens of reviews on one day, which would create groups that never happened.

Google now acts on some attacks itself. In April 2026 it said its systems pause new reviews on a profile, alert the owner and show a banner when they see a sudden spike in spam reviews.

What to do with it

• Two bad reviews in two days is common and is not by itself a sign of an attack.
• Three or more in one day, from accounts you cannot find in your records, is worth a closer look. Screenshot each review, check your bookings and invoices, then report the ones that break policy. Our guide on how to report fake Google reviews lists the signals to check.
• If someone asks for money to stop or remove reviews, do not pay. Follow what to do about Google review extortion.
• Our review monitoring reads each connected profile about once a day and sends one email that lists new one- and two-star reviews, so a group shows up in the next daily email.

Negative reviewers are local, not networks

21,500 reviewers left a one- or two-star review on a profile we monitor. 75 of them did so on more than one profile, and only 12 on more than one client business. Fewer than 1 in 1,000 negative reviewers reviewed more than one client business. One business can have several profiles, which is why the profile count is higher.

Copied reviews are rare as well. Of 15,966 one-star reviews of 40 characters or more, 41 (0.3%) had the exact text of another review on the same profile. Of 202,220 five-star reviews, 322 (0.2%) did. This counts exact matches only, not reviews that were reworded.

The reviewer figures cover our clients only. Someone who posts negative reviews about many businesses that are not our clients would not show here. Google stores a reviewer ID on 97% of the reviews we hold, and the count uses that ID.

What to do with it

• Look for the reviewer in your own records first: bookings, invoices, call logs and staff lists. In our data a negative reviewer almost never reviews a second client business, so the evidence is more likely to be in your records than in a pattern across other businesses.
• If the reviewer is a competitor, read what to do when a competitor leaves fake reviews. If they are a former member of staff, read former employee Google reviews.
• If the same text appears twice on your profile, report both copies and say that the text is repeated. It is rare enough to stand out.

Reviews of every rating disappear, mostly from a few profiles

Between March and early October 2026, 7,052 reviews disappeared from the profiles we monitor with no removal case of ours attached. 5,805 of them (82%) were five-star, but five-star reviews are 87.8% of all reviews, so chance alone gives a five-star majority. Per review, 2.12% of five-star reviews disappeared and at most 4.95% of one-star reviews. The 50 hardest-hit profiles held 62% of the five-star losses, and the median lost five-star review was 26 days old.

A disappearance has more than one cause. Google’s filter removes reviews, reviewers delete or edit their own, and accounts get closed. Our data cannot tell these apart. Some of the 951 one-star disappearances can be our own work that was never linked to a case, so 951 is the most it can be, and 82% is the least the five-star share can be.

A larger public count shows a similar split. Localo, a software vendor, analyzed 335,520 deleted Google reviews on 22,292 profiles from November 2023 to January 2026 and found that 89.1% were five-star and 5.9% one-star. Our guide on why Google reviews disappear gives the month-by-month counts, how the losses spread across profiles, and Google’s own figures and alerts.

What to do with it

• If good reviews vanish, check for Google’s own filtering and for reviewers who deleted their reviews before you suspect a competitor.
• Never buy reviews or offer anything in return for one. When Google finds fake engagement, its profile restrictions can block new reviews, unpublish existing reviews for a set period and show customers a warning that fake reviews were removed.
• Save a copy of your reviews from time to time, so you can see which ones went and when.

What the Google reviews we removed looked like

We hold a stored copy of 1,170 Google reviews that came down after we filed them, from removals a person on our team confirmed between November 2025 and 4 October 2026. Reviews that came down before the business connected its profile to our monitoring have no stored copy and are not in this sample. Nearly 9 in 10 were one-star, and 1 in 3 was more than a year old when we first filed it. The oldest was posted in 2013.

Ages over about a month use Google’s relative dates, so they are right to the month or the year, not the day. 14 of the 1,170 reviews had no star rating we could read, which is why the star rows do not add to 1,170.

Google is most of this work. Of the removals confirmed in our current case system over the same period, Google reviews were 91.2%.

What to do with it

• Do not assume an old review is out of reach. A third of these reviews were more than a year old when we filed them.
• Still, file early. In our experience newer reviews are easier to get removed than old ones. This is why the Review Auto-filer only files reviews published in the last 14 days.
• Follow every report you file. Some removals arrive months after filing.
• Keep watching after a removal. Google can restore a removed review. When one of ours comes back, we file it again at no charge; see can removed content come back.

Method: where the data comes from

The data comes from the Google Business Profiles that businesses connect to TrustReviews monitoring in the TrustOS portal. Our software reads each connected profile about once a day. It stores every review Google shows, with its star rating, text, photos, owner reply and publish date. We read the stored data on 4 October 2026.

Who is in the sample

The sample is 1,106 profiles; 1,105 of them had reviews. 77% of the monitored profiles are in the US, and most of the rest are in Australia, the UK and Canada. Most of the businesses are home services, medical, dental, auto and legal businesses. Every one of them came to a review removal company.

Definitions

• A review: a review Google showed on a monitored profile that was still live on 4 October 2026. Reviews our software set aside as stale history after a full re-read of a profile are left out.
• A negative review: one or two stars where a section says so, and one to three stars where it says “three stars or below”.
• A disappearance: a review missing from two complete reads of its profile in a row. One miss does not count, and a later sighting cancels it. We started recording disappearances in March 2026.
• A removal: a review on a case that a person confirmed as removed. Software never marks a review removed by itself. A case merged into another counts once.
• A reviewer: the reviewer ID Google returns with the review, present on 97% of stored reviews.

Date windows

• Star ratings, profiles, length, blank reviews and replies: reviews published from 8 August 2005 to 4 October 2026, as read on 4 October 2026.
• One-star share by year: the same reviews, grouped by year of publication.
• Disappearances: March to early October 2026.
• Reviews arriving close together: reviews published from 15 March to 4 October 2026 and seen within 3 days of posting.
• Removed reviews and platforms: removals confirmed from November 2025 to 4 October 2026 in our current case system. Removals recorded only in our earlier system are not included.

Limits

• Not a random sample. Every business came to a removal company, so its profile can differ from the average Google profile, for example in how many negative reviews it has or how closely the owner watches them.
• Approximate older dates. Google shows dates such as “a year ago”, so publish dates older than about a month are right to the month or the year.
• Survivorship before our first read. A review that Google or its author deleted before we first read a profile is missing, so older years undercount whatever was removed.
• Disappearances have mixed causes. We cannot tell Google’s filter from a reviewer deleting or editing a review or closing an account.
• No chance baseline for groups of reviews. Busy profiles get reviews close together more often by chance.
• Reviewer overlap covers our clients only.
• Owner replies are as stored at the last read; a reply posted or deleted later is not reflected.
• This study describes reviews. It does not measure what share of reported reviews Google removes.

How to cite this study

You may quote, chart and republish any figure on this page. Please cite “TrustReviews, Google review statistics, October 2026” and link to thetrustreviews.com/faq/google-review-data-study/.

Give the sample with the figure, for example “5.6% of 306,017 reviews on 1,106 Google profiles monitored by TrustReviews, October 2026”. Say that the profiles belong to businesses that use a review removal service. For a figure this page does not show, write to us from the contact page.