TL;DR
A roofer with a hundred and forty reviews, none of them from this year, is in a worse position than one with thirty from the last six months. Seventy-four per cent of people look for reviews written in the last three months. Seasonal trades get a permanent annual gap, and it lands in the researching months.
A roofer with a hundred and forty reviews, none of them from this year, is in a worse position than one with thirty from the last six months. That is not intuitive and it is what the consumer data says.
The number
BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey, covering 1,002 US adults and published February 2026, found 74% look for reviews written in the last three months, and 32% want something from the last two weeks.
The same survey found 97% read reviews for local businesses and 31% will only use one rated 4.5 or above, up from 17% a year earlier. So the bar is rising on rating and the window is narrow on recency, at the same time.
Put those together and a review count is a stock while what people are actually reading is a flow. The total gets you into consideration. The timeline decides what happens next.
Why seasonal trades are the worst case
A restaurant collects reviews every week whether it tries or not. A roofer works in bursts, and if reviews are only requested during the busy months the profile has a visible eight-month gap in it. Every year, permanently, going back as far as anyone scrolls.
Somebody comparing three roofers in February is looking at three timelines. Yours stops in September.
Which is a prominence problem in Google’s terms as well as a persuasion one. Google names relevance, distance and prominence as the three local ranking factors, and adds that there is “no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.” Review activity is one of the few prominence inputs a small trade actually controls, and a seasonal business controls it for four months of the year.
There is a second-order effect that matters more than the perception one: the gap arrives precisely when you are trying to book the next season’s work. The quiet months are when replacement and planned work gets researched, and that is when your profile looks least active.
What I would actually do
- Ask during the busy season, relentlessly, and bank nothing. The instinct is to space requests out. Do not. You cannot control when reviews arrive, only when you ask, and asking during the season is the only window you have.
- Ask at the right moment. For a trade that is when the customer is standing in front of the finished work, not three days later by email. The completion conversation is the highest-yield moment available and most businesses waste it.
- Do not ration or stagger requests. Some businesses hold reviews back to “spread them out”. You cannot bank a review that was never left, and the customer’s willingness decays within days.
- Find the off-season reasons to be in touch. Maintenance visits, warranty checks, gutter clearing, service plans. These exist in most trades and they are the only genuine off-season review opportunity, which is an argument for offering them that has nothing to do with the revenue.
- Reply to every review, including the old ones. A reply carries a date. A profile whose most recent activity is an owner response from last week reads as alive, even where the reviews are older.
And be careful what you wish for on volume alone. A profile that generates more calls than the business can answer converts good visibility into bad opinions, which then arrive as reviews of their own.
What I would not do
Buy them. Beyond the obvious, a burst of reviews arriving in a month when you demonstrably were not working is the easiest possible pattern to spot.
Chase the total. A firm fixated on getting to two hundred is optimising the number that matters least. Thirty recent beats a hundred and forty stale, and it costs less to maintain.
Treat this as a ranking tactic. Review signals feed prominence, which is one of Google’s three local factors, but the honest case here is that 74% of your prospective customers are reading the dates. That argument does not need Google in it.
The short version
- 74% look for reviews from the last three months. 32% want the last two weeks.
- Thirty recent beats a hundred and forty stale.
- Seasonal trades get a permanent annual gap, and it lands in the researching months.
- Ask during the season, at completion, in person.
- Never ration requests. You cannot bank one that was not left.
- Maintenance and warranty visits are the off-season opportunity.
- Reply to old reviews. A reply carries a fresh date.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. Roofing and HVAC SEO covers the profile, the reviews and the season. If you’re not sure which of several plausible problems is costing you, that’s what an SEO audit is for.
