Phil Risher explains how AI ranking systems now use reviews as a trust score. They scrape Google, Yelp, and Angie's List to compare your review volume against competitors, check if you respond to reviews, and need a steady stream of new ones rather than a one-time spike to keep your ranking strong.
These AI platforms, what they do is they're looking for 3 things. They are going and scraping your Google reviews, your Yelp reviews, your Angie's Reviews, all these review platforms, and they're saying, do you have a lot of reviews or not compared to other companies? The second thing, which a lot of people miss this, Google puts this in their criteria for ranking, is you gotta respond to your reviews. Because if you don't respond to reviews, it doesn't show that you care about customer service and they don't trust you. Because if you get a bad review, are you gonna respond or not? And they don't wanna show someone that they're not gonna trust. And then the last one is you have to make sure you're getting consistent reviews. Don't just get 100 and say, okay, I need to go focus on something else. You have to have a consistent flow of reviews so that way you're training these algorithms to be like, yeah, they do a good job. They have great reviews. They response reviews, those things.
