Review recency (and the rough three-month rule)

How fresh your most recent reviews are, often more load-bearing than your total.

The definition

Review recency is how recently your latest reviews arrived. A common rule of thumb is that reviews older than about three months carry noticeably less weight with readers, and a profile whose newest review is a year old reads as stale.

Treat the three-month figure as a heuristic rather than a published threshold, platforms do not disclose their weighting.

Why it matters to a buyer

A prospective customer reading a profile is asking whether this business is still good now. Excellent reviews from three years ago answer a different question than the one being asked.

The same logic applies to systems assembling recommendations from those sources.

What it means practically

A steady trickle beats periodic pushes. Two reviews a month, sustained, keeps recency healthy indefinitely; forty in a week then nothing does not.

Check it yourself

Check the date of your single most recent review. If it is older than about three months, that is the first thing to fix, before volume, before responses, before anything else.

Then check your closest competitor's most recent review date. That comparison is what a buyer makes implicitly.

See where you actually stand

A free Visibility Check runs twelve real buying questions for your category across three surfaces.