Online Review Statistics 2026: Trust, Fakes & Star Ratings
The most quoted online review statistic, “88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations,” comes from BrightLocal’s 2014 survey, and most of that 88% was a yes with conditions attached. BrightLocal still asks the question. In its 2026 edition the answer is 49%. Here are the online review statistics worth knowing in 2026, each sourced inline with the year noted.
The 88% “trust reviews like a friend” stat is a 2014 number
88% of consumers say they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations was the headline finding of BrightLocal’s 2014 survey (BrightLocal Local Consumer Review Survey 2014, 2014). The sample was 2,104 people from BrightLocal’s own consumer panel, 90% in the US and 10% in Canada, surveyed in May and June 2014.
Most of the 88% was conditional. In the same survey, 32% said they trust a review as much as a personal recommendation “as long as there are multiple ones to read,” and another 30% only “if they believe it to be authentic” (BrightLocal, 2014). By our arithmetic, at least 62 of the 88 points were conditional answers.
Only 8% answered “Yes, always” when BrightLocal added that option in 2015, while a further 72% said they would trust reviews only if certain criteria were met (BrightLocal, 2015). That edition compared its 80% with “83% in 2014,” not with the 88% that still circulates.
The figure fell to 49% when BrightLocal widened the answer options in 2022 to compare reviews with social media personalities and expert articles, not just friends and family. BrightLocal wrote that the change “has led to a large decrease in these figures” (BrightLocal, 2022).
49% of US consumers trust reviews as much as personal recommendations in 2026, up from 42% in 2025 (BrightLocal Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, 2026). The 2026 edition surveyed 1,002 US adults on a representative SurveyMonkey panel and was published February 11, 2026. If you need a current number, cite 49% and the 2026 edition. The 88% belongs to different answer options, a different sample and a different decade.
| BrightLocal edition | Trust reviews as much as personal recommendations | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 79% | |
| 2014 | 88% | At least 62 points conditional |
| 2015 | 80% | “Yes, always” added: 8% |
| 2016 | 84% | |
| 2017 | 85% | |
| 2018 | 78% | |
| 2019 | 76% | |
| 2020 | 79% | |
| 2022 | 49% | Answer options widened |
| 2023 | 46% | |
| 2024 | 50% | |
| 2025 | 42% | |
| 2026 | 49% | 1,002 US adults |
Source: each edition of the BrightLocal Local Consumer Review Survey. Edition years are publication years, and BrightLocal lists no 2021 edition.
97% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses
97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses, and 41% “always” read them when looking for a business, up from 29% a year earlier (BrightLocal, 2026). The average consumer uses six different review sites.
82% of U.S. adults at least sometimes read online ratings or reviews before buying something for the first time, and 40% always or almost always do (Pew Research Center, 2016). Pew surveyed 4,787 adults in late 2015 and hasn’t repeated the question, but it remains the largest neutral measure. 53% of 18- to 29-year-olds always or almost always read reviews, against 23% of adults 65 and older.
85% say positive reviews make them more likely to use a business, and 77% say negative reviews make them less likely (BrightLocal, 2026).
93% of consumers have made a purchase after reading reviews, and 27% have spent more than $1,000 that way (BrightLocal, 2026). 70% have also made a purchase after reading reviews that they later regretted.
Google’s share of review readers fell from 83% to 71% as AI tools reached 45%
71% of consumers used Google to read reviews of local businesses in 2026, down from 83% in 2025 (BrightLocal, 2026). Google is still first by a wide margin.
45% now use ChatGPT or other AI tools for local business recommendations, up from 6% the year before, which makes AI the third most-used source (BrightLocal, 2026). Apple Maps nearly doubled, from 14% to 27%.
82% of consumers read AI-generated review summaries, and 23% would be happy to decide on the summary alone (BrightLocal, 2026).
More than 1 billion reviews were published on Google Maps in 2025 (Google, 2026), from a contributor community Google puts at over 500 million people (Google, 2026).
45% of consumers left a Google review in the past year, ahead of Facebook (34%), Yelp (24%) and Apple Maps (17%) (BrightLocal, 2026).
47% of consumers won’t use a business with fewer than 20 reviews
47% of consumers won’t use a business with fewer than 20 reviews, and only 9% will use one with five or fewer (BrightLocal, 2026).
The “consumers read 10 reviews before trusting a business” stat is retired too. BrightLocal reported an average of 10 in its 2018, 2019 and 2020 editions, up from 7 in 2017 (BrightLocal, 2020). None of the editions we checked from 2022 to 2026 reports it.
74% of consumers only care about reviews written in the last three months, and 32% look for reviews from the last two weeks, up from 20% in 2025 (BrightLocal, 2026). 18% are only swayed by reviews from the past week.
The first five reviews do most of the work. In Northwestern’s Spiegel Research Center data, “nearly all of the increase in purchase likelihood occurs within the first 10 reviews, and the first five reviews drive the bulk of this increase” (Spiegel Research Center, 2017). Lower-priced items needed only two to four reviews to see a significant impact.
The 270% review lift comes from one gift retailer
“The purchase likelihood for a product with five reviews is 270% greater than the purchase likelihood of a product with no reviews” is the exact sentence in the Spiegel Research Center report “How Online Reviews Influence Sales” (Spiegel Research Center, 2017). It is usually repeated as “reviews increase conversions by 270%.”
The 270% comes from a single high-end gift retailer: about 15.5 million page views of 1,800 products by 7.8 million users over one year, in data supplied by the review platform PowerReviews (Spiegel Research Center, 2017). The underlying paper is Askalidis and Malthouse, “The Value of Online Customer Reviews” (ACM RecSys, 2016).
The report broadens its own finding. Its summary page says “Displaying reviews can increase sales by 270% on average” (Spiegel Research Center, 2017), a bigger claim than five reviews against none at one retailer.
Reviews lifted conversion 190% for a lower-priced product and 380% for a higher-priced one at the same retailer (Spiegel Research Center, 2017).
The report’s “nearly 95% of shoppers” read reviews figure is footnoted “PowerReviews Internal Data” (Spiegel Research Center, 2017). It is the vendor’s number, not one Spiegel measured.
68% of consumers require four stars, but purchases peak below 5.0
68% of consumers will only use a business with four stars or more, up from 55% in 2025, and 31% require 4.5 stars, up from 17% (BrightLocal, 2026). Just 10% will only use five-star businesses, and 92% say star ratings matter when choosing.
Purchase likelihood “typically peaks at ratings in the 4.0 - 4.7 range, and then begins to decrease as ratings approach 5.0” (Spiegel Research Center, 2017). In no product category was the best rating 5.0. The same report’s summary page narrows the peak to 4.2 to 4.5 stars, so cite the page you quote.
59% of businesses on Google average above four stars, against 79% on Facebook and 96% on HomeAdvisor, in a 2024 working paper by FTC economist Devesh Raval covering more than 100,000 businesses (Raval, 2024). For businesses in the lowest quality tier, ratings on Google, Facebook and HomeAdvisor averaged 1.7 stars higher than on the Better Business Bureau’s platform. The paper notes the views are the author’s, not the FTC’s.
69% of consumers wrote a review in the past year
69% of consumers wrote a review of a business in the last 12 months, and 94% say they are open to writing one (BrightLocal, 2026). The typical consumer writes four to six reviews a year, and 20% wrote more than 10 in 2025.
60% wrote about a positive experience, against 29% about a negative one (BrightLocal, 2026).
Around one in ten Americans nearly always post their own reviews of products, services and restaurants, while roughly half sometimes do (Pew Research Center, 2016).
78% were asked for a review, and 83% of those asked wrote one
78% of consumers were asked to leave a review in the past 12 months, and 83% of the people asked went on to leave one (BrightLocal, 2026). BrightLocal’s summary states the same result as 65% of all consumers writing a review after being asked. By our arithmetic, 65% of everyone is 83% of the 78% who were asked.
28% say they will “always” write a review if asked, up from 16% in 2025 (BrightLocal, 2026).
Up to 80% of reviews originate from follow-up emails urging shoppers to review a purchase, per PowerReviews internal data cited by the Spiegel Research Center (2017). Treat it as a vendor figure.
Prompted reviews rate higher: verified buyers who reviewed from an emailed request averaged 4.34 stars, against 3.89 for anonymous reviewers (Spiegel Research Center, 2017). Spiegel’s explanation is friction: a prompted buyer needs a few clicks, while an unprompted reviewer has to go to the site and create an account, which mostly happens when they are unhappy.
11% of consumers were offered an incentive to write a positive review in the past year (BrightLocal, 2026). Tying a reward to positive sentiment is banned under the FTC rule below.
89% of consumers expect a reply, and the average business answers 46.9% of Google reviews
89% of consumers expect business owners to respond to reviews, 19% expect a same-day reply (up from 6% in 2025), and 81% expect one within a week (BrightLocal, 2026).
80% are likely to use a business that responds to all its reviews, while 42% are unlikely to use one that ignores them (BrightLocal, 2026). Templated or generic replies make 50% unlikely to choose the business.
The average business responds to 46.9% of its Google reviews and 3.1% of its Yelp reviews, in SOCi’s 2026 Local Visibility Index of 2,751 multi-location brands and roughly 350,000 locations (SOCi, 2026). SOCi sells local marketing software, and its sample is chains and franchises, not independent shops.
Hotels that started responding to reviews saw ratings rise 0.12 stars and review volume rise 12%, and received fewer but longer negative reviews (Proserpio and Zervas, Marketing Science, 2017). It is one of the few causal estimates of what replying does. Response-time expectations for support channels are in customer service statistics.
Fake review estimates run from 4% to 16%, and few are measurements
“4% of all online reviews are fake,” costing $152 billion a year, comes from a 2021 study by the marketing-security company CHEQ, written up on the World Economic Forum’s site by CHEQ’s director of communications (World Economic Forum, 2021). The 4% is an average of “official figures and self-reporting” by review sites, not a count of fake reviews, and CHEQ’s study page now redirects to its homepage. It is a vendor estimate.
11% to 15% of reviews in three product categories on popular UK e-commerce platforms are fake, by a machine-learning model Alma Economics built for the UK Department for Business and Trade (UK Department for Business and Trade, 2023). The categories were consumer electronics, home and kitchen, and sports and outdoors. It is a government-commissioned model estimate, not a platform audit.
Roughly 16% of restaurant reviews on Yelp were filtered as suspicious in a study by Michael Luca and Georgios Zervas that used Yelp’s filter as a proxy for fraud (Luca and Zervas, Management Science, 2016). Restaurants were more likely to commit review fraud when their reputation was weak. The paper first circulated in 2013, so the data are old.
Trustpilot removed about 11% of all reviews submitted in 2025 as fake: 7.8 million of roughly 70.1 million, 91% of them caught automatically (Trustpilot Annual Report 2025, 2026). The share was 7.4% (4.5 million) in 2024 and 6.1% in 2023 (Trustpilot, 2025).
| Source | Figure | What kind of number |
|---|---|---|
| CHEQ via World Economic Forum (2021) | 4% of all online reviews | Vendor estimate built from platform self-reports |
| Trustpilot (2025) | 7.4% of 2024 submissions removed as fake | Platform-reported removals |
| Trustpilot (2026) | About 11% of 2025 submissions removed as fake | Platform-reported removals |
| UK Department for Business and Trade (2023) | 11% to 15% in three product categories | Government-commissioned model estimate |
| Luca and Zervas (2016) | About 16% of Yelp restaurant reviews filtered | Academic measurement using Yelp’s filter |
| Yelp (2026) | 17% not recommended, 11% removed in 2025 | Platform moderation, not all of it fake |
A platform’s removal count measures what it caught, not what got through. When you cite a fake review share, name the source, the year and which of these three kinds of number it is.
Google blocked or removed 292 million reviews in 2025
Google blocked or removed over 292 million policy-violating reviews in 2025, while publishing more than 1 billion (Google, 2026). By our arithmetic, that is roughly 29 reviews taken down for every 100 published. Both figures are given as minimums, and “policy-violating” covers spam and off-topic posts as well as fakes.
The count is more than five times the 2020 level: 55 million in 2020 (Google, 2021), over 115 million in 2022 (Google, 2023), over 170 million in 2023 (Google, 2024) and more than 240 million in 2024 (Google, 2025).
Google also removed over 13 million fake Business Profiles in 2025 and restricted posting on more than 782,000 accounts (Google, 2026). In April 2026 it said profiles hit by a sudden spike of spam reviews will have new reviews paused and a banner shown to consumers, part of its response to scams that demand payment to remove fake one-star reviews.
Amazon proactively blocked more than 250 million suspected fake reviews in 2023 and over 275 million in 2024 (Amazon, 2025). For 2025, its first Trustworthy Shopping Experience Report says only “hundreds of millions” (Amazon, 2026).
Yelp filtered out nearly 500,000 suspected AI-generated reviews in 2025 and shut down more than 1.3 million fraudulent accounts (Yelp, 2026). Of about 22 million reviews contributed, 70% were recommended, 17% not recommended, 11% removed by Yelp’s moderators and 2% deleted by their authors.
The FTC’s fake review ban took effect October 21, 2024
The FTC announced its final rule banning fake reviews and testimonials on August 14, 2024, on a 5-0 vote, giving the agency the power to seek civil penalties against knowing violators (FTC, 2024). It took effect on October 21, 2024 (Federal Register, 2024).
The rule bans six practices: fake reviews by people who don’t exist (including AI-generated ones) or who had no real experience with the business; incentives conditioned on a positive or negative review; undisclosed reviews by company insiders; company-controlled review sites posing as independent; suppressing reviews with groundless legal threats or intimidation; and buying or selling fake followers or views (FTC, 2024).
Each violation can cost up to $53,088, the civil penalty level the FTC set in January 2025 (Federal Register, 2025) and left unchanged for 2026 (Federal Register, 2026).
97% of consumers think businesses caught using fake reviews should face some consequence, 57% want them banned from review platforms, and 63% say the platforms should be responsible for catching fakes (BrightLocal, 2026).
Most happy customers are never asked at the right moment
Asking works: 83% of consumers who were asked for a review left one, and 94% are open to writing one (BrightLocal, 2026). What breaks is the timing, because the request depends on someone remembering to send it once the customer has left. Carly takes that step off the to-do list. A Carly workflow can go through each day’s appointments every evening and email every customer the review link, or send it the moment a job or order is marked done in a tool the business already uses, since Carly connects to thousands of apps. Customers who book through a Carly booking page land on the same calendar, so they get asked too. Carly also triages the inbox, so a complaint gets a fast reply before it turns into a one-star review. For the wider picture of the businesses doing this work, see small business statistics.
FAQ
What percentage of consumers read online reviews? 97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses, and 41% always do (BrightLocal, 2026). Pew’s neutral measure found 82% of U.S. adults at least sometimes read reviews before a first-time purchase (Pew Research Center, 2016).
Do people trust online reviews? 49% of US consumers trust reviews as much as personal recommendations (BrightLocal, 2026). The widely quoted 88% is from BrightLocal’s 2014 survey, when most of that yes was conditional on there being several reviews or on the reviews seeming authentic.
How many reviews do customers read before buying? BrightLocal last reported an average of 10 in its 2020 edition. In 2026, 47% of consumers won’t use a business with fewer than 20 reviews (BrightLocal, 2026).
What percentage of online reviews are fake? Estimates range from 4% (CHEQ, 2021, a vendor estimate) to 11% to 15% in three product categories (UK Department for Business and Trade, 2023, a model estimate). Trustpilot removed about 11% of 2025 submissions as fake (Trustpilot, 2026).
How many people leave reviews? 69% of consumers wrote a review of a business in the past 12 months, typically four to six a year (BrightLocal, 2026).
What star rating do customers trust? 68% will only use a business rated four stars or higher, and 31% require 4.5 (BrightLocal, 2026). Purchase likelihood peaks between 4.0 and 4.7 stars, not at 5.0 (Spiegel Research Center, 2017).
Related: Missed Call Statistics · SMS Marketing Statistics · Cold Email Statistics
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