What a review response rate is, and how to work yours out
A simple fraction with one genuinely contested part, which is what goes underneath the line.
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Review response rate, in one sentence
Review response rate is the share of the reviews you received in a period that you publicly replied to.
The denominator is the whole argument. Counting every review you have ever received gives a number that can only fall, because old unanswered reviews never leave the pile. Counting the reviews that arrived inside the period tells you whether you are keeping up now, which is the question the metric is for.
Platforms differ in what a reply even is. On some, an owner reply appears under the review and the reviewer is notified. On others there is no owner reply at all, so a business working those platforms carries a rate capped below 100 percent through no fault of its own. Compute it per platform for that reason alone.
GetSetReply drafts a reply for every review it pulls in and puts it in front of you. It publishes nothing on your behalf, so the rate stays a number about your decisions rather than about a machine's.
Working out a response rate for one month
Take the reviews that arrived inside the month and count how many carry a public reply now. Reviews from the last two days are the awkward part: either exclude them or accept a small drag on the figure.
- Reviews received in March
- 42
- Of those, replied to publicly
- 31
- Still unanswered
- 11
31 divided by 42 is 0.738, so March came in at 73.8 percent, or 74 percent rounded. Reaching 90 percent on the same month needed 38 replies, which is seven more, which is about twenty minutes of work spread across four weeks.
That last translation is the one worth doing every time you set a target. A percentage is easy to argue with in a meeting. Seven replies is a task somebody can finish.
Who your replies are actually for
A reply is read by the people who come after, not by the person who wrote the review. That is the entire economics of it. One reply to one complaint is seen by everybody who reads that listing for the next year, which is a far larger audience than the complainant.
Google's own guidance says responding shows you value your customers and their feedback, and that positive reviews and helpful replies can help a business stand out. It is one of the very few things in local search that is both explicitly encouraged and entirely within your control.
The rate also protects you from what actually goes wrong, which is rarely one badly judged reply. It is six weeks of silence followed by four defensive replies written in a single sitting on a bad afternoon.
The misconception: only bad reviews need answering
The common rule of thumb is to reply to the one and two star reviews and leave the rest alone.
That rule builds a reply history in which every owner comment sits under a complaint. A reader scrolling the listing sees a business that speaks only when it is defending itself, which lands worse than saying nothing at all.
It also throws away the easiest reply you will ever write. Four sentences under a five star review takes a minute, names the thing the customer liked, and reads to the next person as a business paying attention. Answering the good ones is what makes answering the bad ones look ordinary.
Questions about replying to reviews
Five things owners ask once the rate is on a page in front of them.
What is a good review response rate?
Measure against your own last quarter first. If you want an external target, replying to everything inside a week is achievable for a single location and is far more useful than a percentage nobody in the shop can act on.
How fast should I reply?
Fast enough that the reviewer still remembers the visit, which in practice means days rather than weeks. No major platform publishes a deadline, so this is a judgement rather than a rule.
Can a tool reply for me?
GetSetReply drafts the reply and hands it to you to post. Nothing is published on your behalf, which is deliberate: a reply that carries your name should be read by you first.
Should I reply to a review with no words in it?
Yes, briefly. A rating with no comment gives you nothing to answer, so thank the person and stop. It still counts as a reply on the listing and it still reads well to the next visitor.
Does replying change my star rating?
Not directly. It changes whether the reviewer edits their own rating later, and it changes what the next reader thinks of you, and those are the two effects that matter.
Never behind again
Every review, with the reply already written
GetSetReply drafts in your voice from what the customer actually said. You edit if you want to, then post it yourself.