You’ve got 200 reviews and a 4.8 rating. Solid, right?
Not if the most recent one is from eight months ago.
Recency is the biggest lever, by a wide margin
Review recency is now the single biggest individual local ranking factor. Reviews under 30 days old carry full algorithmic weight. By 180 days, that same review has decayed to somewhere between 10 and 20% of its original influence. A business with 15 reviews from the past month is telling Google something completely different to a business with 200 reviews collected over three years and nothing since.
That means a burst of reviews when you first set up your profile, then silence, is close to worthless a year later. Review signals aren’t a one-time box to tick. They’re an ongoing operational habit, closer to posting on social media than filling out a form once.
Why Google actually cares about this
It’s not an arbitrary rule. Total review count alone can’t tell Google whether you’re still a good business right now. A business that closed down, changed hands, or quietly went downhill would still show a wall of old five-star reviews if totals were all that mattered. Recency is Google’s way of asking “are you still good today,” not “were you good once.”
That’s why a business with fewer, fresher reviews can outrank one sitting on a bigger, older stash. It’s not being generous to smaller businesses. It’s asking a more useful question, and reviews from three years ago simply can’t answer it.
Volume still matters, just less than freshness
Review signals account for somewhere between 16 and 20% of local pack ranking weight, and that share has been growing.
All else equal, more reviews still beats fewer.
But “more reviews from years ago” loses to “less reviews more consistently”.
Sterling Sky, a well-known Local SEO agency, has documented this repeatedly: in one case, a business’s rankings collapsed after the owner stopped an active review request habit, then recovered once reviews started flowing again. Same business, same service, same historical review count. The only thing that changed was whether new reviews kept arriving.
What this actually means for your Business
Most small and medium businesses should be aiming for somewhere in the range of 4 to 8 new reviews a month to keep the recency signal alive. Busier, high-frequency businesses should be aiming higher.
The number that actually matters isn’t your total review count. It’s whether new ones are still landing every month, because that’s the number Google is watching right now, not the one from three years ago.
If you’re sitting on a strong total but haven’t collected a new review in months, that number is quietly losing value every week it sits there.