Do Google reviews expire? Not technically. A five-star review from three years ago sits on your Google Business Profile forever unless the person who wrote it deletes it or Google removes it for a policy violation. But a review's influence has a shelf life even when the review itself doesn't, and the 2026 data on how buyers actually read a review list is more specific, and less forgiving, than most owners assume.
The short answer
Every review you have ever received still counts toward your all-time star average, in full, forever. That part never changes. What changes is how much weight a shopper gives that average once they notice your most recent review is old. This is a different problem from reviews that vanish or never show up at all, which is usually a filtering or syncing issue, not an aging one. Here, the reviews are all still there. They're just quietly losing their say.
What counts as too old in 2026
BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey, published in February, put numbers on a feeling most owners already had: shoppers aren't reading your whole review history, they're checking whether anything recent backs up the average.
Zoom out and the pattern holds. The same survey found 74% of consumers want to see at least one review from the last three months before they'll trust a star rating at all, and 44% call a review posted within the last month an important factor in that decision. None of this means your three-year-old reviews stop counting toward your average. It means they stop doing the job of proving you're still the business people are reading about today.
Why freshness moves buyers, not algorithms
It helps to separate two questions that get lumped together. One is a ranking question: does Google's local algorithm reward recent reviews? Yes, recency and review velocity are established local-ranking inputs, covered in full in do Google reviews help SEO. The other is a trust question, and it has nothing to do with any algorithm: a shopper who lands on a profile with a 4.8-star average built entirely from 2023 and 2024 reviews has no evidence the business they'd actually be dealing with, this month, with today's staff and today's supply chain, still deserves that number.
That second question is the one most freshness advice skips, because it isn't about gaming a ranking. It's about the honest read a real person takes in the ten seconds before they decide to call.
“A five-star average is a resume. A review from last week is a reference.”
The 3-in-90 freshness check
Total review count and star average are both lagging indicators. They describe years of history, not this quarter. The number actually worth tracking is smaller and easy to check in under a minute: how many new reviews landed in the last 90 days.
- Count how many reviews you've received in the trailing 90 days, not your all-time total.
- 3 or more in 90 days clears BrightLocal's 3-month recency threshold for most shoppers.
- 1 or 2 is borderline: fine for now, worth a nudge before it drifts to zero.
- 0 means your profile currently reads as stale to the 74% of shoppers who check for a recent review before trusting the rating, no matter how good your all-time average is.
Where replying fits in
There's a second lever here that has nothing to do with asking customers for anything, and it's easy to miss because it looks like a completely different topic: replying to the reviews you already have.
Correlation isn't a guaranteed cause, and the study looked at hotels specifically, not every industry. Still, it's a reasonable, low-risk bet: a profile that replies consistently reads as an active, attended-to business, which seems to be exactly the impression that invites the next review. A reply habit ends up doing double duty, it's the courteous thing to do for the person who wrote the review, and it may quietly feed the freshness number covered above.
How fast to reply is a separate question, covered in full in how fast should you respond to a Google review. The short version here: a reply on a months-old review is still worth writing, just don't pretend it was instant.
How to fix a stale profile
None of this calls for a burst campaign. A cluster of new reviews landing in the same week, especially if they read alike, is exactly the pattern Google's spam detection is built to notice, and it can look manufactured to a human reader too. The fix is a small, steady habit, not a one-time push.
That's great to hear, thank you! If you have 20 seconds, would you mind leaving that same feedback as a quick Google review? It genuinely helps other people find us, and I can text you the link right now if that's easier.
Ask right after a visibly good interaction, not in a monthly batch email to your whole customer list. The full script library and funnel is in how to get more Google reviews.
- Treat 3 new reviews per rolling quarter as a hard floor, not a nice-to-have
- Ask happy customers in the moment, right after a good interaction
- Keep replying on a steady cadence, including old unanswered reviews
- Track your trailing-90-days count, not just your all-time total or star average
- Assume a high star average or a big total review count excuses months of silence
- Send one mass blast of review requests to cover a quiet quarter, it reads as a burst, not a habit
- Offer a discount, gift, or prize entry for a review, that's an incentivized review and against Google's policy
- Pre-screen customers by how happy they seemed before asking, that's review gating and explicitly banned
If the honest bottleneck is time rather than knowledge, replying to every review the same day it lands is the habit that keeps a profile looking alive, and it's the whole premise behind Resparo's approach to review automation: the everyday replies go out fast on their own, the sensitive ones wait for a one-tap approval, and plans start at a fixed monthly price on the pricing page. To see what a reply would sound like on a review you already have, the free reply generator takes about ten seconds.