Review recency (and the rough three-month rule)
How fresh your most recent reviews are, often more load-bearing than your total.
What is review recency?
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 does review recency matter to a buyer?
Review recency matters because a star average cannot say whether a business is still good today. 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 does keeping review recency healthy look like in practice?
In practice, recency is held up by the rhythm of asking rather than by the size of any one push. A steady trickle beats periodic pushes. Two reviews a month, sustained, keeps recency healthy indefinitely; forty in a week then nothing does not.
How do you check your own review recency?
Checking your own review recency takes one look at a profile page and no tools. 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
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