What is Review velocity?
Review velocity is the rate at which a business gains new reviews over time — how many arrive per month, rather than how many it has in total.
Review velocity is the rate at which a business gains new reviews over time — how many arrive per month, rather than how many it has in total.
A business with three hundred reviews and nothing in eight months and a business with sixty reviews gaining five a month are in very different positions, despite the first having five times the total. The second is visibly active, its recent reviews describe the business as it currently operates, and its total will pass the first within a few years.
Velocity matters to search engines as a freshness signal and to customers as a currency signal. Someone comparing three businesses reads the date on the most recent review to work out whether any of the rest is still true — a strong historic rating with nothing new reads as a business that may have changed hands, changed staff or slipped.
Steadiness matters more than bursts. A sudden spike of thirty reviews in a week after two quiet years looks like what it usually is, and platforms treat unnatural patterns with suspicion. A consistent handful each month is both more credible and easier to sustain.
It is the metric that tells you whether you are catching up or falling behind. Comparing your monthly rate with your competitors' predicts where you will both be next year far better than comparing totals does.
Running a review campaign, hitting a target, and stopping. Velocity that drops to zero undoes the freshness advantage within a few months.
Review velocity is part of reputation management
Understanding the term is the easy half. The service page describes what the work actually involves, and the free assessment says whether it is the thing your business should be spending on next — which is frequently a different question.
Things that come up alongside it
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