The State of Review Requests 2026
What 963,740 review requests from 1,043 businesses in the US and Canada show about getting Google reviews: how fast customers answer, what a reminder is worth, and whether text beats email.
Source: ReviewTec analysis of 963,740 review requests sent by 1,043 US and Canadian businesses, October 2024 to September 2026.
How to read the numbers. A review is only counted here when we could link it to the customer who was asked. Most of those reviews (92%) are on Google, where our matching looks only for 4- and 5-star reviews. So the review rates below are a floor: the real numbers are higher.
Texts get answered fast, emails take longer
When a customer responds to a text, it usually happens fast. Half of the reviews that came from a text request were started within an hour of the text, and 84% within a day. About 1 in 8 were started in the first minute.
Email is slower. The median was about seven hours. The jump around day 3 is the reminder that most businesses send two days after the first message.
38,208 reviews from text requests (644 businesses) and 23,426 from email requests (469 businesses). Time steps are not evenly spaced. Email's first-minute figure runs high: about 1 in 6 of those reviews shows a tap within 10 seconds of sending, which looks like a mail security scanner.
See the numbers
| Within | Text | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 minute | 13.1% | 23.1% |
| 5 minutes | 23.5% | 25.8% |
| 15 minutes | 33.1% | 28.8% |
| 1 hour | 50.3% | 35.9% |
| 3 hours | 65.1% | 43.7% |
| 6 hours | 72.8% | 49.0% |
| 12 hours | 77.5% | 52.4% |
| 1 day | 84.0% | 57.9% |
| 2 days | 88.8% | 62.6% |
| 3 days | 93.0% | 84.9% |
| 7 days | 97.0% | 94.1% |
One reminder is worth sending
A reminder went out on 35% of requests, only to customers who hadn't responded yet, and usually two days later. Those reminders produced 16.8% of all the reviews in the study (10,805 of 64,451). Put another way, one reminder added about 20% more reviews than the first message earned on its own.
Businesses that use reminders heavily get even more from them. Among the 179 businesses with at least 30 matched reviews and 30 reminders, an average of 28% of reviews came after the reminder.
Ask one customer at a time
We looked at 62 businesses that sent requests both ways: individually, and through bulk lists or automated sends. Averaged across those businesses, individual requests earned a review 10.8% of the time, against 6.9% for bulk and automated sends. That's about 1.6 times the rate. Individual requests came out ahead at 44 of the 62 businesses, and bulk at 17.
This is a comparison, not an experiment. Someone asking right after a job is a different moment from a list uploaded later, and that timing is probably part of the difference.
Text or email? Both work
Text and email got customers to a review site at almost the same rate. Email had a small edge in reviews, but it isn't consistent: at 84 businesses that sent at least 100 of each, text did better at 46 and email at 38. Which channel a customer got also depended on the contact details the business had.
| Text | ||
|---|---|---|
| Requests | 643,100 | 293,755 |
| Businesses | 905 | 679 |
| Tapped through to a review site | 13.3% | 13.6% |
| Led to a matched review | 6.0% | 8.0% |
| Median time to a review | 59 minutes | 7 hours |
Taps count only when they came at least 30 seconds after sending. Between 16% and 18% of first taps come within 10 seconds, which looks like phone previews and mail scanners rather than people.
Don't overthink when to send
We compared 233 businesses with their own usual results. No weekday and no working hour moved results by more than about 5%. Early evening and weekends were slightly better: requests sent between 5 and 8 p.m. earned about 4% more reviews than usual, and Saturday requests about 5% more.
Customers answer on their own schedule. 85% of requests go out between 9 and 5, but 27% of reviews were started after 5 p.m. Weekend requests are about 11% of the total, and 17% of reviews came from customers who first tapped through on a weekend.
Based on 64,445 reviews and the time of the customer's tap to Google just before each one. The first and last columns group several hours.
See the numbers
| Hour | Share of reviews |
|---|---|
| Before 8 a.m. | 4.7% |
| 8 a.m. | 2.5% |
| 9 a.m. | 5.7% |
| 10 a.m. | 8.8% |
| 11 a.m. | 8.6% |
| Noon | 8.7% |
| 1 p.m. | 8.2% |
| 2 p.m. | 8.1% |
| 3 p.m. | 8.5% |
| 4 p.m. | 8.9% |
| 5 p.m. | 7.4% |
| 6 p.m. | 5.8% |
| 7 p.m. | 4.9% |
| 8 p.m. | 4.0% |
| 9 p.m. | 2.7% |
| 10 p.m. and later | 2.4% |
What to expect
Across 390 businesses with at least 100 requests, the median earned a matched review from 10.6% of its requests, or about 1 in 10. The middle half ranged from 5.8% to 18.6%, and the top 10% earned 28.7% or more.
The trade matters. Businesses with occasional, higher-value jobs, like law firms and HVAC companies, earned a matched review from about 1 in 6 requests. High-volume appointment businesses earned about 1 in 17 to 20. Health care businesses often send customers to sites other than Google, which our matching mostly misses, so their real rate is likely higher.
| Industry | Businesses | Requests | Requests per matched review |
|---|---|---|---|
| Law firms | 54 | 11,038 | 6.0 |
| HVAC | 32 | 12,131 | 6.3 |
| Home services (all, including HVAC) | 308 | 128,147 | 9.6 |
| Auto repair and body | 33 | 45,880 | 12.0 |
| Personal care and fitness | 24 | 63,082 | 17.1 |
| Health care (all) | 113 | 193,718 | 19.9 |
A rough guide. Industry was inferred from keywords in business names, and 45% of requests couldn't be classified, so they aren't shown here.
Five things to try
- Use the contact details you have. Text and email reach a review site at the same rate, so don't hold a request back waiting for a mobile number.
- Send one reminder. About 1 in 6 reviews in this study came after a reminder.
- Ask person by person where you can. Individual requests earned about 1.6 times the review rate of bulk and automated sends.
- Send when the job is done. The hour and the weekday changed results by only a few percent, so there's no need to save requests for a perfect time.
- Measure against your trade. About 1 review for every 10 requests is typical, and the right number for your business depends on what you do.
How we did this
- The data. Review requests sent through ReviewTec from October 1, 2024 to September 30, 2026, by businesses in the US and Canada. Results were counted up to November 7, 2026, so every request had at least five weeks to get an answer.
- Left out. Test requests, requests marked as failed, and ReviewTec's own test and demo businesses.
- A request is one customer asked once, by text or email. A reminder is part of the same request.
- Tapped through means the customer went from the review page to a review site, counted only at least 30 seconds after sending.
- A matched review is a review linked to the customer who was asked. On Google, a review is paired with a customer who tapped through a few minutes before it appeared and whose name matches, then a person approves the match. Only 4- and 5-star Google reviews are matched, and businesses with review checking turned off are left out of review rates.
- Averages. Where it matters, each business was compared with itself or counted once, so that a few very large senders don't decide the result.
- Local time is the time zone of the business location.
- Privacy. Every figure is a count or percentage across many businesses. No group with fewer than 1,000 requests or 20 businesses is shown, and no customer or business is named.
Using this report
You're welcome to quote these figures with a link to this page. Suggested credit: ReviewTec, The State of Review Requests 2026, www.reviewtec.com/state-of-review-requests-2026. Reporters and researchers can reach us through the contact page.
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