Glossary · Review collection
Review velocity
Review velocity is the rate at which a business earns new reviews — reviews per week or per month — as distinct from its lifetime total. Local ranking systems weigh recency and steadiness: a business adding a handful of reviews every month reads as active and currently good, while one whose latest review is eight months old reads as decaying regardless of its historical count. Velocity is also hard to fake: steady, organic accumulation across months looks nothing like a purchased burst. Operationally, velocity is why the durable fix for reviews is a repeatable ask — a printed QR at the till that reaches every customer — rather than a one-off campaign that spikes and stops.
In practice
What it means for a local business.
Volume still sets the bar for entering a market's top tier, and it varies enormously by industry. In BigLove's benchmarks study — computed from 3,300+ businesses across 349 city leaderboards — the median review count of a top-10 board's last seat ranges from 283 (gyms) to 1,255 (restaurants). Velocity is how a business closes that distance: at 20 new reviews a month, a 400-review gap is a 20-month project, which is exactly why starting the ask today matters more than any single tactic.
The healthy pattern is boring: a consistent trickle, every week, from the same physical ask surfaces. Bursts — twenty reviews in a weekend, then silence — correlate with incentivized or purchased reviews and attract both algorithmic discounting and human suspicion.
Go deeper
Related guides & tools.
Put the vocabulary to work.
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