What is the relationship between review rating and search ranking?

Review rating and local ranking are linked, but the relationship is richer than a single star number. Google’s local algorithm reads a bundle of signals: the rating itself, the volume of reviews, their recency, the sentiment in the text, and whether the business responds. A steady flow of recent, substantive reviews with owner responses signals an active, engaged business and tends to rank above a competitor with a slightly higher average but stale, unanswered reviews. The same signals feed the AI engines, which ingest review platforms when assembling answers about local and category queries. The practical takeaway is that you cannot treat reviews as a vanity number to maximize once; ranking rewards the ongoing pattern. We track how review signals translate into local search performance with IMPACT™, because for a location-based business the reviews are not separate from search visibility – they are one of its main inputs.