Most local business owners know reviews matter. What they don’t know is how specifically Google uses them — quantity, recency, content, and response patterns — to decide who shows up in the top three results and who doesn’t. Here’s what the algorithm is actually evaluating, and what to do about it this week.
If you’re anything like most small business owners with a website (including myself), you’ve spent a lot of time mulling over design, agonized over the copy, or tinkering over controls to make it. And that’s not necessarily misplaced energy, given that for most of the internet’s history, your website was your digital storefront. But for local businesses in 2026, that’s no longer entirely true.
We looked at the actual research — peer-reviewed studies, large-scale data analyses, and Google’s own data — to find out if optimizing your Google Business Profile really drives customers. The short answer: yes, and the numbers aren’t small.