Three published thresholds decide whether a local business is considered at all

The published consumer data describes three separate gates. 68% of consumers require a rating of four stars or better. 47% will not use a business carrying fewer than twenty reviews. 74% consider only reviews written in the last three months. These are not points on a single scale and they cannot be traded against one another: a business at 4.9 stars with eleven reviews fails the second gate, and a business with four hundred reviews whose most recent one is from last spring fails the third. Meanwhile Google Search is the first channel for 52% of local buyers and appears somewhere in the journey for 71%, with 75% using more than one channel before deciding.

A 4.9 rating with eleven reviews and a 4.6 rating whose newest review is fourteen months old fail different published thresholds, and neither failure is visible in the star average.

1. 01

   Three gates, and clearing one is not partial credit

   These are overlapping consumer populations measured in the same survey, so the shares cannot be multiplied into a single pass rate — and the model does not try. What they establish is that three independent tests exist, that a business can pass any one while failing another, and that a programme reporting only the star average is blind to two of the three.

2. 02

   Recency is the gate that decays without anyone doing anything wrong

   Rating and count are stocks. Recency is a flow. A business that stops asking does not see its rating or its count fall, so nothing on a standard report changes, while the corpus quietly ages past the window three quarters of consumers say they read within.

3. 03

   Review velocity behaves like a channel and should be funded like one

   It has a list, a trigger, a message, a response rate and a measurable output per month. The model gives it an owner, a monthly target expressed as reviews rather than as requests, and a line in the reporting beside paid and organic rather than a footnote underneath them.

4. 04

   Multi-channel checking makes inconsistency expensive rather than untidy

   With 75% of local buyers using more than one channel, a name, number or hours mismatch between two surfaces is not a hygiene issue seen by nobody. It is seen by the majority of buyers, at the exact moment they are comparing.

**87% won't consider a business under 3★**; most require **4★+**; consumers read **~10 reviews** on average; recency still matters (though its weight is declining — only 42% now trust reviews as much as personal recommendations).

The model audits against the three gates separately and reports them separately from the first week. Where the rating gate is clear but the count gate is not, the work is volume: a request trigger fixed to a completed transaction, on the platform the business's own buyers actually use rather than on all of them at once. Where the count gate is clear but recency is not, the work is cadence: a standing monthly floor of new reviews with a named owner. Listing consistency is closed across every surface in a single pass rather than platform by platform, because partial consistency is what the multi-channel buyer is most likely to catch. Media is added only once all three gates are clear, since paid traffic arriving at a profile that fails a threshold is paid traffic buying a rejection.

1. 1

   Weeks 1–2

   Three-gate audit

   Rating, count and most recent review date measured per location

   Owner: OmniFlow

2. 2

   Weeks 2–4

   Listing consistency pass

   Name, number, hours and categories aligned across every surface in one pass

   Owner: OmniFlow

3. 3

   Weeks 3–5

   Review trigger

   Request fixed to a completed transaction, on the platform the buyers use

   Owner: OmniFlow + client

4. 4

   Month 2 onward

   Recency floor

   Standing monthly minimum of new reviews, named owner, reported as an output

   Owner: Client + OmniFlow

5. 5

   Month 4 onward

   Media

   Added only once all three gates are clear

   Owner: OmniFlow

6. 6

   Month 6

   Review

   Three gates reported separately, never as a single score

   Owner: OmniFlow + client

The model reports three numbers where most local programmes report one: rating, review count, and the age of the most recent review. It would expect the third to be the one that moves first under a cadence and the one that decays first without one. No combined score is produced, because combining them is what allows a business to look healthy while failing a gate. All inputs here are published consumer benchmarks; the business's own per-location figures replace the framing from week two. Where a location clears all three gates and demand still does not arrive, the model treats that as evidence the constraint sits somewhere else entirely and says so, rather than continuing to spend against a problem it has already solved.

Modelled. Inputs: BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (1,002 US consumers); BrightLocal, Where are your customers really searching? 2026 (1,227 US consumers). Modelled outputs are not a forecast or a guarantee of results. Cited: BrightLocal *Local Consumer Review Survey 2023–2025*.

Every figure below is published research, not a client result. They are the inputs to the arithmetic above, listed so it can be checked rather than taken on trust. The bracketed number points to the full citation at the end of this page.

These are the surfaces this engagement is run and measured from, shown with representative figures built around the benchmarks cited on this page. Every account we run reports into views like these, and you keep ownership of all of them.

Each figure on this page, the system it is read from, and the definition and window it is measured over.

Not applicable — this is a modelled engagement. Its weakest input is that both benchmark sets are stated consumer preference from surveys of around a thousand people, not observed behaviour, and stated thresholds are consistently sharper than the ones people apply in practice. The model uses them to decide what to measure and in what order, not to predict how many buyers a given business will lose, and the audit phase replaces the framing with the location's own numbers before any budget follows.

A modelled capability, not a client account. Figures illustrate what the model produces and are labelled as modelled wherever they appear. See all our work

Full citations for everything cited on this page, with the sample and period each study covers, so you can go and read the original.