How do Google Reviews affect business reputation?

Google Reviews shape reputation because they no longer sit on a separate page that a user has to seek out. The star rating renders directly in the Knowledge Panel and on Maps, and the review text is ingested by AI engines that paraphrase it as ‘customers say.’ That makes four things material: the rating itself, review velocity (whether recent activity signals an active business), sentiment, and the quality and presence of owner responses. Google’s local algorithm weights all of them, and the AI engines treat aggregated review content as authoritative third-party evidence. We track how a business’s reviews render across Google with IMPACT™ and how the AI engines summarize them with AIQ™, because the practical risk is no longer a bad review buried on page two – it is a bad review quoted in the synthesized answer a customer reads first.