Review monitoring: track your reviews and competitors'

Review monitoring means checking, on a schedule, what customers say about you and your competitors on the review sites your buyers actually read, and tracking a handful of numbers over time. Your own reviews need alerts and replies. Competitors' reviews need a monthly snapshot and an honest read.

Most businesses do the first half and skip the second, which is a shame, because a competitor's reviews are the cheapest research you will ever get.

Which review sites to watch

Start with where your buyers look, not with every site that has a page about you.

Two or three sites cover almost every business. Monitoring eleven review sites badly is worse than monitoring two well. Reddit is not a review site, but people review products there more frankly than anywhere else; Reddit monitoring is its own routine.

Google. In your Business Profile, choose More, then Notifications, and make sure customer activity alerts are on. They cover new reviews and photos (Google's notification settings).

G2. Vendors set a notification frequency per product from the email settings icon and can reply from the review table (G2's documentation).

Capterra. Capterra, GetApp and Software Advice share listings within Gartner Digital Markets, and vendors reply through its vendor portal.

Apps. Both stores let developers reply to reviews from their consoles.

The five numbers worth tracking

Star ratings alone hide almost everything. These five, recorded monthly for you and each competitor, show what is actually moving.

1. Review count. The total today.

2. Velocity. New reviews per month, worked out from two counts. This is the number most people never calculate and the one that predicts the future.

3. Recent rating. The average of the last 20 reviews, worked out by hand. Most platforms show a long-run figure that moves slowly, so a business that has been getting worse for three months can still show 4.8.

4. Star spread. The share of reviews at each star level. Two businesses at 4.3 can be very different: one with steady fours, one with mostly fives and a lump of ones. The lump is a recurring failure, and it is usually the same one.

5. Response behaviour. Do they reply, how fast, and do they reply to the bad ones? A competitor that stops replying has lost the person who did it.

Then one column of words: the complaint that keeps coming up. Reading for that properly is a separate skill, covered in how to find your positioning in competitors' reviews.

A worked example

Say you run a dental practice with two local rivals. These numbers are made up. You note Google review counts on 1 July and 1 October, and average the latest 20 reviews for each.

Two things fall out that the headline ratings would never show.

Rival A is slipping. A 4.8 all-time rating, a 4.1 recent one and only four new reviews a month. Something changed in the last few months: a dentist left, the booking system broke, prices went up. Read their newest one and two star reviews and you will usually find it named.

Rival B is on course to overtake you. They are adding 21 reviews a month to your 8, so they gain 13 a month on you. You lead by 85, so at this pace they pass you in about six and a half months. A jump like that usually means they started asking every patient, often with an automated text after the appointment. Your response is not to panic about the rating. It is to start asking too.

That is the whole method. Two dates, three counts, one sum.

How often to check

Your own reviews: as they arrive. Notifications do the watching. Reply within a few days, and faster for anything angry.

Competitors: monthly. Record the five numbers on the first of the month. Ten minutes per competitor.

Weekly if you are in a busy local market where rivals actively chase reviews, such as restaurants, or during a launch, a price change or anything else likely to move sentiment.

A proper read once a quarter. The newest twenty reviews for each competitor, start to finish.

The monthly snapshot is boring and it is the part that pays. Without two dates you cannot calculate velocity, and velocity is the number that tells you who is investing in their reputation.

Responding to your own reviews

On Google you reply from Read reviews, then Reply, and you can edit or delete the reply later. Replies are checked against Google's content policies first, which usually takes up to 10 minutes and occasionally up to 30 days. The reviewer is notified, and they can edit their review after reading your reply (Google's review management help).

That last point is why replies matter. A calm, specific reply to a two star review is the only realistic way it ever becomes a four.

What works: thank them by name, address the specific complaint, say what changed if something did, and give a way to continue offline. What does not: arguing the facts in public, offering anything in exchange for changing the review, or pasting the same paragraph under every review.

The rules on asking for reviews

Velocity comes from asking, and asking has rules that are stricter than most businesses realise.

The Google line rules out "review gating", where a survey sends happy customers to Google and unhappy ones to a private form. Do not use it, whatever a software vendor tells you.

Google can also penalise a profile: stopping new reviews for a period, unpublishing existing ones for a period, or showing shoppers a warning that fake reviews were removed (Google's restrictions). If you ever see that warning on a competitor's listing, you have learned something about how they got their rating.

Quirks that distort the numbers

Compare like with like, and know what each platform does to its figures.

Trustpilot's TrustScore is not an average. Recent reviews carry more weight, and every calculation includes seven neutral 3.5 star reviews, which matters less as reviews pile up (Trustpilot). A new competitor with ten glowing reviews will not show a five.

Yelp's visible count leaves some reviews out. Not recommended reviews sit behind a link at the bottom of the page and are excluded from the rating and count.

App ratings can be reset. A developer can reset the overall App Store rating when releasing a new version. Written reviews stay, and the product page shows a message that the rating was recently reset (Apple). A competitor's suddenly perfect rating might be three weeks old.

Velocity spikes need a second look. Dozens of reviews in a fortnight after months of quiet usually means a new request process. Occasionally it means something Google's fake engagement policy would not like. Read a sample before drawing either conclusion.

Review monitoring tools

The free method is notifications for your own profiles and a spreadsheet for competitors. Paid tools are mostly built for the first job: collecting, routing and replying to your own reviews across many locations.

Prices below were read from each vendor's own pricing page on 4 October 2026.

If your main job is replying to reviews across ten locations, buy one of these. If your main job is knowing how competitors' reputations are moving, most of them are more than you need. The review monitoring tools roundup compares them properly.

For the competitor half, ours, Figo, records each tracked competitor's Google rating, review count and star spread, and their Trustpilot rating and review count, once a week, and the Monday briefing says when one of them moves. Starter is $49 a month for three competitors. The Google figures come from an index that can lag the live profile by a few weeks, and Figo does not read G2, Capterra, Yelp or app store reviews, does not reply to anything and does not analyse review text. If you need to manage your own reviews, Figo is the wrong tool.

For a local business, the whole routine, reviews included, fits in an hour a month: the local competitor monitoring guide shows how.