Do replies to Google reviews help your Maps ranking? 960 listings in 48 markets

1. Why I ran this

A service business owner asked on Reddit whether writing every review reply by hand was worth the time, and whether switching to AI-written replies would change their local rankings. The replies were confident and contradictory, and nobody had numbers.

Some commenters said replies are one of the most important things in Google's eyes. The most careful answer said the opposite: the payoff is the people reading the replies, and nobody has shown that reply wording moves the map pack (r/localseo). Both sides were guessing. So I measured the part that can be measured from the outside: whether businesses that rank higher in Google Maps reply to more of their reviews.

I took six home-service trades (roofing, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, landscaping and garage door repair) in eight U.S. cities, pulled the top 20 Google Maps results for each of the 48 searches, and then the 20 newest reviews of every listing with their owner replies. That gave 919 listings with reviews and 15,760 reviews. Business names are left out of the data file.

2. What Google and earlier studies say

Google recommends replying but does not call replies a ranking factor. The largest published study links responsiveness with Local Pack visibility but gives no effect size, and the best causal evidence is about ratings, not rankings.

Two of these come from companies that sell listing, website or data products (Yext and UENI, both vendors). Yext compares businesses that reach the Local Pack with those that only show in Maps, across many industries, and reports which features correlate most, not how many positions a reply is worth. Its own conclusion is that best practices are not universal. The hotel study is the strongest evidence that replies matter, but what it measured is what guests do after a hotel starts replying, not where Google ranks the hotel (Proserpio and Zervas).

3. How often do businesses reply?

Often, in these trades. 70% of the 919 listings had replied to at least one of their last 20 reviews, 46% replied to 80% or more, and 59% of all sampled reviews carried an owner reply.

The pattern matches what UENI found across small businesses: the happy customers get thanked more often than the unhappy ones get answered (UENI, vendor). The levels are very different, though. UENI found replies on 29.3% of five-star and 9.8% of one-star reviews; here it was 61% and 39%. These are businesses that already rank on page one of Maps in competitive trades, and many of them clearly have a review routine. It also means that among the businesses you compete with, replying is normal rather than a differentiator.

Replying varied by trade. Garage door repair listings replied to a mean 66% of their recent reviews, electricians to 40%. Recent reviews are overwhelmingly positive: 93% of the sample are five-star, and the 20 newest reviews of a listing covered a median 179 days.

4. Do top-ranked listings reply more?

A little. Top-3 listings replied to a mean 58% of their recent reviews, against 54% for positions 4 to 10 and 53% for 11 to 20. A quarter of the top 3 replied to none.

The difference in mean reply rate between the top 3 and positions 11 to 20 is 5 points. Resampling the 48 searches puts the 95% interval at minus 2 to plus 12 points, so it could be zero. The top 3 also have more reviews. Businesses that reply tend to be the busier ones, which is the first reason a raw comparison flatters replies.

Grouping listings by how much they reply shows the same thing from the other side. Listings that replied to none of their recent reviews made the top 3 13% of the time; listings that replied to 90% or more made it 17% of the time. With about 19 listings per search, pure chance would put any group in the top 3 roughly 16% of the time.

5. Comparing like with like

Within the same search, reply rate did not predict position. Rating was the only review signal with a clear link, and none of them explained much: distance and relevance likely do most of the work.

Comparing a plumber in Denver with a roofer in Boise says little, so I compared listings only against others in the same search. Within each of the 48 searches, a higher reply rate went with a better position in 28 and a worse one in 20; the median rank correlation was minus 0.05, close to none. If you pick a top-3 listing and a listing ranked 11 to 20 from the same search, the top-3 one replies more 55% of the time, barely better than a coin toss.

All four review signals together explained under 2% of the variation in position within a search. That is not a sign that reviews are irrelevant. It shows how much the rest matters: the searches were set to a city, so how close each business sits to that point, and how well its categories match the trade, likely drive most of the order. I did not measure either. Google itself says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and popularity (Google). I saw the same with review counts in August: across 72 searches in these trades, the most-reviewed company held a top-3 Maps spot only 5.6% of the time.

6. Negative reviews: the gap worth noticing

The clearest difference was on bad reviews. Top-3 listings replied to 52% of their recent 1 to 3 star reviews, positions 11 to 20 to 37%. The interval is wide, so treat it as a direction, not proof.

The numbers are small: 111 critical reviews among the top 3 (58 answered), 486 among positions 11 to 20 (178 answered). Resampling by search gives a 95% interval of minus 1 to plus 32 points for the gap. Even if it is real, one possible explanation is not that Google rewards answering complaints, but that businesses which answer complaints are better run in other ways too, and those other ways show up in ratings and reviews.

For a customer it is the part that matters most. A critical review with a calm, specific reply is read by people deciding between you and a competitor. The hotel study found that once businesses started responding, they received fewer but longer negative reviews, which the authors read as unhappy customers holding back short complaints they could not defend (Proserpio and Zervas). Reviews also shape what AI assistants say about a business; I collected the evidence on how often they get business facts wrong in this roundup.

7. What to do with your review replies

Reply for the people reading, starting with the critical reviews, and do not expect replies to move your Maps position. Put ranking effort where Google's help page points: relevance, complete business information and more reviews with positive ratings.

1. Answer every 1 to 3 star review first. That is where the top 3 differed most, and it is the exchange future customers read. Be specific about what happened and what changed.
2. Keep five-star replies short. A one-line thank-you is enough. If a tool drafts it, have a person check it; nothing here shows that reply wording affects ranking, so the only risk is how it reads.
3. Make it a routine, not a campaign. Check reviews once or twice a week. Among the businesses you compete with, replying is the norm: 70% of listings in this study replied to at least some recent reviews.
4. Do not buy replies as a ranking service. If someone sells review responses as the lever that will move you into the map pack, ask for their evidence. I could not find any.
5. Spend ranking effort where Google points. More reviews and positive ratings, accurate categories and a profile that matches what people search for. The small business SEO checklist covers the basics.

9. Methodology and limitations

Google Maps results for 48 searches and the 20 newest reviews of each listing, collected through DataForSEO on November 9, 2026, for 1.47 USD.

• Searches: six trades (roofing contractor, HVAC contractor, plumber, electrician, landscaping company, garage door repair) in Phoenix, Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Nashville, Kansas City, Boise and Des Moines; English, desktop, top 20 Maps results with the city as the location (DataForSEO, vendor). 960 listings, of which 919 had at least one review.
• Reviews: up to 20 newest reviews per listing, with the owner's reply if any (DataForSEO, vendor). 695 listings had 20 or more reviews; for the rest, all their reviews were used. Reply rate is replies divided by reviews sampled.
• Analysis: comparisons by position group; rank correlation within each search; a regression of position on reply rate, log review count, rating and log days since the newest review, with each variable centred within its search; 95% intervals from 1,000 to 2,000 resamples of whole searches.
• Not measured: reply timing. Review dates change when a customer edits a review, and 743 of 9,369 replies were dated before their review, so I left speed out. I also did not measure reply wording or whether replies were written with AI.
• One snapshot, one location point: position depends on where the searcher is. A grid of locations or a different day would give different orders, and correlation is not cause: a business that replies may differ in many other ways.
• Scope: U.S. home services only. Restaurants, hotels or healthcare may behave differently; Yext found that the signals linked with visibility vary by industry and region (Yext, vendor).
• Data: data-listings.csv (one row per listing, names omitted) and data-summary.json (every number on this page), CC BY 4.0.

10. Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. r/localseo. "Is replying to Google reviews manually actually worth the time?" November 9, 2026. reddit.com/r/localseo/comments/1xreong/is_replying_to_google_reviews_manually_actually/. Accessed November 9, 2026.
2. Google Business Profile Help. "Manage customer reviews." support.google.com/business/answer/3474050?hl=en. Accessed November 9, 2026.
3. Google Business Profile Help. "Tips to improve your local ranking on Google." support.google.com/business/answer/7091?hl=en. Accessed November 9, 2026.
4. Michael Iannelli, Sneha Kuchipudi and Adam Abernathy, Yext Research. "Best Practices Will Only Take You So Far." 8.7 million Google search results, U.S. August 4, 2025. Vendor: sells local SEO, review or data products. yext.com/research/article/best-practices-will-only-take-you-so-far. Accessed November 9, 2026.
5. Pedro Fonseca, UENI. "How Do Small Businesses Respond to Google Reviews? We Analyzed 229,882 to Find Out." Last updated August 19, 2026. Vendor: sells local SEO, review or data products. ueni.com/blog/google-review-response-study/. Accessed November 9, 2026.
6. Davide Proserpio and Georgios Zervas. "Online Reputation Management: Estimating the Impact of Management Responses on Consumer Reviews." Marketing Science 36(5), 645-665, 2017. Open-access record, Boston University. open.bu.edu/handle/2144/40312. Accessed November 9, 2026.
7. DataForSEO. "Google Maps SERP: live advanced" API documentation. Vendor: sells local SEO, review or data products. docs.dataforseo.com/v3/serp/google/maps/live/advanced/. Accessed November 9, 2026.
8. DataForSEO. "Google Reviews: task_post" API documentation. Vendor: sells local SEO, review or data products. docs.dataforseo.com/v3/business_data/google/reviews/task_post/. Accessed November 9, 2026.

Last updated: November 9, 2026. Related research: all studies.