# No One Has Measured the ROI of Review Replies Yet URL: https://www.getrankonmap.com/blog/roi-of-responding-to-reviews Published: 2026-10-07 There is no published, trustworthy number for how many extra calls a local business gets from replying to its Google reviews. As of September 2026 the honest answer to a client who asks is that nobody has measured it cleanly. You can measure it for their own profile, if you set the test up before you start. On **18 July 2026** a practitioner put the question to r/localseo: "when someone asks 'how many extra calls will i get if i respond to every review' i do not have a number for that." We went looking in our own corpus and didn't find one either. ``` REVIEW-REPLY THREADS IN OUR CACHED CORPUS — Aug 2025 to Aug 2026 ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┬────┐ │ threads that mention replying to reviews │ 39 │ │ about replies going missing or not showing │ 11 │ │ report data on replies Google rejected │ 1 │ │ report a before-and-after number for calls │ 0 │ └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┴────┘ r/localseo + r/GoogleMyBusiness + owner rooms · counted 21 Sep 2026 ``` ## Why Nobody Has the Number Three things get in the way. Replies rarely start on their own. They usually come as part of a wider profile cleanup, so any change in calls has several causes. The "calls" figure on the profile isn't a clean count either. In May 2026 a practitioner described 14 profile calls in the report while the client said no real inquiries had come in, and noted that quick taps can be counted as calls. And replies are hard to isolate, because the profile, the season and the competitors all change at the same time. So the claim you can defend is narrower than "replying brings X calls". It's that replies change what a prospect reads, and for some prospects what they read decides the call. ## What a Reply Actually Changes A practitioner who reads a lot of listings in the UAE described the decision in August 2026. People open Maps, sort by newest, and read three or four reviews: > Prospects go looking for the worst review on purpose. They are not checking > whether something went wrong, they assume it did. They are checking what you > did about it. An unanswered complaint confirms the accusation. > > — r/localseo, August 2026 That is a claim about conversion, not rankings. Replies to complaints are where it matters most. A profile full of five-star reviews with a thank-you under each is a weaker case than one calm, specific answer under the one-star. ## Check the Replies Are Actually Live Before measuring anything, confirm people can see the replies. In June 2026 a team reported analysing **12,752** review replies that Google had rejected without notice. The triggers they found included generic AI phrasing, the same template sent to dozens of customers, and contact details inside a reply to a bad review. That is their data, and we have not checked it. Separately, in July 2026, 11 threads in our corpus reported replies disappearing from profiles. Several said the reviews were still there and only the replies were gone. A reply that Google rejected, or that a bug hid, has no chance of paying off. ## How to Give the Client a Real Answer Make it their own test, not an industry number: ``` 60 DAYS BEFORE START 60 DAYS AFTER calls, website clicks reply to same metrics, same length directions (GBP) every review, compare to before AND to the same period last year complaints same 60 days last year first note any other change ───────────► note any other change ``` Compare against the same weeks last year as well as the previous 60 days, to take out seasonality. Write down anything else that changed in that window. If calls go up and nothing else changed, that's a real result for that client. If other things changed, report it as "replies plus X", not as replies alone. ## What to Tell the Client 1. **Say plainly that nobody has a clean industry number.** Then offer to measure theirs. 2. **Reply to complaints first**, calmly and specifically, in the reviewer's language, with no copied templates. 3. **Check replies are showing** on the live profile from a logged-out browser after posting. 4. **Run the 60-day test above**, with dates recorded, alongside the fixes in [three local audits, one problem](/blog/three-local-audits-one-problem). 5. **Keep the ranking claim separate.** For what reviews do for rankings, see [do reviews improve Google Maps ranking](/blog/do-reviews-improve-google-maps-ranking), and for tying any of it to calls, [ranked #1 but the phone is not ringing](/blog/ranked-1-but-phone-not-ringing). ## Sources **Our own data.** Collected for this page and not published elsewhere. - **Review-reply thread count**: 39 threads mentioning review replies in our cached corpus, August 2025 to August 2026. 11 about replies going missing, 1 with rejected-reply data, 0 with a before-and-after calls figure. Counted 21 September 2026. **Cited externally.** Accessed September 2026. | source | what it supports | |---|---| | [r/localseo, 18 July 2026](https://www.reddit.com/r/localseo/comments/1v017v8/client_asked_me_what_the_roi_of_responding_to/) — the ROI of responding to reviews | the case; the quoted question; the request for before/after data | | [r/localseo, 6 August 2026](https://www.reddit.com/r/localseo/comments/1vgzj91/i_read_a_lot_of_uae_google_listings_and_the/) — the rating is almost never the thing costing you customers | sort by newest, read 3–4; the quoted passage on the worst review | | [r/GoogleMyBusiness, 4 June 2026](https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleMyBusiness/comments/1twqcbt/review_replay_moderation_google_can_remove_your/) — Google can remove your replies | 12,752 rejected replies and the triggers, as the poster reported and unverified by us | | [r/localseo, 12 May 2026](https://www.reddit.com/r/localseo/comments/1tb7slc/started_managing_a_dietitians_google_business/) — dietitian's profile | 14 profile calls vs no real inquiries; taps counted as calls | | [r/GoogleMyBusiness, 22 July 2026](https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleMyBusiness/comments/1v3h4ih/review_replies_all_missing/) — review replies all missing | replies disappearing from profiles in July 2026 |