Is response rate the same as response time?

No — response time measures how quickly you reply once a review lands; response rate measures what percentage of your total reviews have a reply at all. A business can be fast on the reviews it answers and still have a low overall response rate if a large share go unanswered.

Should I reply to every single positive review too, or just the negative ones?

Negative and neutral reviews are worth treating as close to mandatory, since they're what future customers scrutinise most closely. Replying to positive reviews is valuable too and worth building as a consistent habit, but it's reasonable to prioritise the harder ones first if time is limited.

Does Google show my response rate anywhere on my profile?

Not as a published statistic — there's no badge or percentage Google displays publicly. It's visible only in the sense that anyone scrolling your reviews can see for themselves how many have a reply, which is exactly why a consistently answered profile makes a better impression than one where replies are occasional.

Reputation

What's a Good Google Review Response Rate? (And How to Calculate Yours)

Most advice about replying to reviews focuses on how fast — this is about how often. Response rate and response time measure two different things, and the gap between them is where a lot of businesses are quietly losing trust.

Updated 19 August 2026 · 6 min read

Two different numbers, often confused

Response time is how long it takes you to reply once a review lands — hours or days. Response rate is a completely different measure: the percentage of your total reviews that have a reply on them at all. A business can be fast to reply to the reviews it does answer and still have a poor response rate overall, if half its reviews sit untouched.

Response rate matters because it's visible to anyone scrolling your profile, not just the person who wrote the review. A visitor skimming your last twenty reviews can see at a glance how many have an owner reply underneath — and a profile where replies are the exception rather than the norm reads as a business that isn't paying attention, even if the ones you did answer were thoughtful.

How to calculate it

The calculation itself is simple: replied-to reviews divided by total reviews, over whatever period you're measuring. Google Business Profile doesn't surface this as a single stat in the free dashboard, so most businesses either count manually over a sample of recent reviews or use a review-management tool — including Cedric — that tracks it automatically across the full history.

Measuring it over a rolling recent window, such as the last three or six months, tells you more about your current habits than an all-time figure, which can be dragged down permanently by a stretch of reviews nobody replied to years ago and that you have no practical way to go back and fix.

What counts as a good number

Google doesn't publish an official benchmark for what response rate is considered good, and be wary of any source that states one as fact. What's reasonable to aim for is close to 100% for negative and neutral reviews — those are the ones future customers read most closely, and an unanswered complaint sitting in isolation is the worst-looking outcome on the whole profile — with positive reviews replied to as consistently as your time allows.

A useful frame: treat every one- to three-star review as close to mandatory to answer, and treat replying to five-star reviews as a habit worth building rather than an obligation. Both matter, but they don't carry equal weight if you're short on time.

Why the rate matters even when you can't fix the underlying issue

Some negative reviews are about something you genuinely can't change after the fact — a one-off supply issue that's since been resolved, a booking system that's been replaced, a complaint about a decision that was correct at the time. Replying doesn't undo the experience the reviewer had, but it does something separate and just as valuable: it shows every future reader that the business engages with feedback rather than going quiet when it's uncomfortable.

A profile with a strong reply history reads as more trustworthy at the same star rating than one without, because the replies are proof the rating reflects an engaged business rather than one that's simply never been challenged.

The trap of chasing 100% the wrong way

A perfect response rate achieved with the same generic line copied under every review — "Thanks for your feedback!" regardless of what was actually said — reads worse than a slightly lower rate made up of genuine, specific replies. Anyone comparing two or three reviews on your profile will notice the repetition quickly, and it undercuts the trust a high response rate is meant to build in the first place.

If you're using AI or template assistance to keep the rate up at scale, keep the output specific to what each reviewer actually said — a tool that drafts from the review's own content rather than a fixed script avoids the copy-paste problem while still making a high response rate achievable for a busy or multi-location business.

Tracking it across multiple locations

For a business with more than one location, an overall response rate can hide a real gap — one site replying to everything and another falling behind, averaging out to a number that looks fine on paper. Track the rate per location rather than only as a single company-wide figure, and treat a location whose rate is meaningfully behind the others as worth a direct conversation with whoever's managing replies there.