Yes, reviews are one of the clearest ranking signals Google gives a local business, and unlike backlinks or content depth, you can move them within weeks. The three inputs that matter are review count, average rating, and how recently reviews came in. None of them replace the basics, like a complete profile and consistent name-address-phone data across listings, but skipping reviews while chasing everything else leaves an obvious signal on the table.
What Google actually weighs
Local pack rankings run on proximity, relevance, and prominence, and reviews sit almost entirely inside prominence. Industry ranking-factor research, including Whitespark's ongoing local search surveys, consistently places review signals among the top handful of factors. Whitespark's guide puts review-related signals at roughly a fifth of total local pack ranking weight once you combine count, rating, and recency. That's a bigger single-category share than most business owners assume.
Volume matters on its own. One 2026 industry analysis found that businesses crossing the 50-review mark rank meaningfully higher than competitors stuck below it. Rating matters separately: the businesses holding the top spots in competitive local categories tend to sit at 4.8 stars or higher, and a profile below 4.0 rarely shows up there regardless of how many reviews it has.
Recency counts as much as the total
A profile with 200 reviews and nothing new in eighteen months signals something different to Google than one with 60 reviews and five from last week. Review platforms treat an active review stream as evidence the business still operates the way it's listed. This is the part most reputation advice skips, because it's less satisfying than a single big number to hit: getting to fifty reviews once and stopping is worse for ranking, long-term, than a slower trickle that never stops. How many Google reviews you need covers the specific thresholds. This recency effect is the reason those thresholds keep resetting instead of staying fixed once you clear them.
Responses are a signal too
Google has said owner responses factor into ranking and trust, and templated replies carry less weight than specific ones. A reply that names the actual complaint reads as an actively managed business; a copy-pasted "thank you for your feedback" reads as an abandoned one. An unanswered one-star review sitting at the top of a profile for months is a stale signal on a page that's otherwise trying to look current, and stale signals rank worse.
The average-rating problem nobody mentions
Here's the part that makes review-count advice incomplete: chasing volume without protecting the average can work against you. One or two harsh reviews can pull a strong average down by enough to matter, and it takes several good reviews to offset each bad one. This is where rating-first routing earns a place in the conversation. A flow where every customer rates first and then chooses where that rating goes catches a frustrated customer's feedback the same day, in a private inbox, instead of three weeks later as a public review dragging the average down.
That's different from filtering who gets asked, which is exactly what Google's review-gating rules prohibit. Every customer needs to see the same prompt and the same choice regardless of how they rated. Where that line sits is worth reading before you touch review collection at all. The SEO upside of more reviews disappears fast if the collection method itself violates platform policy.
Building the habit, not the spike
None of this rewards a one-time push. A steady process, asking consistently, responding to what comes in, and keeping the ask somewhere a customer will actually use, beats an occasional campaign that spikes the count and then goes quiet for a year.
Starboard's rating flow is built around that steady version by default: every scan produces a rating, every rating routes based on the customer's own choice, and staff can see which codes are actually generating fresh reviews each month instead of relying on memory.
Reviews won't outrank a business with a broken Google Business Profile or no real presence in the category. But between two businesses that have the basics covered, the one with more recent, higher-rated, actively-answered reviews shows up first. That gap is one of the more fixable ones in local SEO.