Why Businesses Should Reply to Google Reviews

Google shows three reviews by default on every profile, sorted by relevance and not by date. Replying to those reviews is the only content on the profile that the company writes itself and that the customer reads before deciding.

A single store that replies to its reviews does it for its customers. With several locations, the replies also get compared from one location to the next.

What the customer actually sees

They open the profile of the nearest location. Google shows them three reviews. They are not the three most recent ones: Google sorts them by relevance. The customer reads those three, checks whether anyone replied, and forms a view in seconds.

The review stays the same, but what the customer concludes from it changes. Faced with a critical review left unanswered, they assume nobody reads. Faced with the same review followed by a dated and signed reply, they see that the company read it and answered.

What we measured

In September 2026 we opened 51 Google Business Profiles across seven hardware and renovation banners in Quebec, none of them a Lanla client. On each profile we looked at the three reviews displayed by default. Of the 153 displayed reviews examined, half had no reply from the merchant.

From one banner to the next, the reply rate ranges from 96% to 0%. On a third of the profiles, none of the displayed reviews received a reply.

The banners compared use the same platforms and see the same reviews. In one banner, somebody was given the job of replying to reviews, with the time to do it. In the other, nobody was.

Survey run 1 to 4 September 2026. n = 51 profiles, 153 displayed reviews, 7 banners. Margin of error of roughly 14 points on the average. Google sorts displayed reviews by relevance, not by date. No banner is named.

Feedback has moved

In our brand perception surveys we observe three things.

1. Consumers say less and less about what they experienced. Feedback addressed directly to the merchant is in decline.

2. Dissatisfaction moves to public platforms. The customer would rather write from a distance than speak up at the counter.

3. A single bad experience is enough for them not to come back.

These three observations converge: the comment you no longer hear in store is the one you now read on your profile. You can reply to it, and your reply is read by every customer who consults the profile afterwards.

Qualitative findings drawn from Lanla’s brand perception surveys. These are observations, not measurements, and they are presented as such.

Five rules for replying to a review

1. Reply to every review, including the positive ones. They are the quickest to handle and the most often forgotten.

2. Give each profile the exact name of its location. Google displays that name as the author of every reply, so a naming gap between two locations shows up under every review.

3. Sign in the body of the text when a person wants to be named. The personal name appears nowhere else, and this is the only way to show that a human read the review.

4. Reply to the specific dissatisfaction the customer expresses, not to the review in general. When the problem needs follow-up, give a way to reach you rather than settling it in public.

5. Do not copy the same reply from one review to the next. Google shows three reviews on the profile, one below the other: a customer who sees the same text three times understands that nobody read the reviews.

A template saves time on the shape of the reply, provided the content comes from the review itself.

Google displays the reply under the name of the Business Profile, followed by the owner label. The personal name of the person replying never appears, even when they write from their own account. Two consequences when you manage several profiles: the profile name is read again under every reply, which makes naming gaps between locations visible everywhere, and signing in the body of the text remains the only way to show that a person read the review. Verified in Google documentation on 21 September 2026.