In this week’s episode of Local Search Tuesdays, I’m diving into BrightLocal’s latest Consumer Data Survey, and trust me—you don’t want to miss these insights!
Every year, BrightLocal surveys consumers to uncover how they search for local businesses, what influences their decisions, and how their behavior is evolving. This year's results reveal some game-changing trends that could significantly impact your local SEO strategy!
I’ll break down the key findings, explain what they mean for your business.
Video Transcript
Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. This week, I’m sharing some interesting new stats from BrightLocal’s 2025 consumer review survey.
Every year since 2010, BrightLocal has conducted its Local Consumer Review Survey, and the results for this year’s version were released a few weeks ago. There’s a ridiculous amount of data in the survey results, so you should head over to bit.ly/brightlocal-review-survey-2025 to read the whole thing.
To try to keep this short, I’m going to call out some of the datapoints that jumped out at me, in no particular order
83% of consumers said that they use Google to read reviews, followed by 48% using local news, 44% using Yelp, 40% using Facebook, and 34% using YouTube. Only 20% said they use TikTok to find reviews.
89% of consumers expect business owners to respond to both positive and negative reviews. Only 55% said they’d buy from a business that only responds to negative reviews and only 53% would buy from a business that only responds to positive reviews.
74% of consumers check at least 2 review sites before making a purchase decision.
I thought it was really interesting that when people were asked about the most important review factors, 53% said that the review describing a positive experience was important - but that’s down from 75% saying the same thing in 2022. I guess people care more about bad reviews now?
Review recency is becoming less important as well - when asked how recently a review needs to have been left to influence a consumer’s decision, only 20% said it needed to be left within the last 2 weeks. In 2023, it was 25% of consumers.
48% of people said they’d read an AI-generated summary of reviews - but they’d also read a handful of positive and negative reviews as well.
There is a ton of data in the survey, but this would be a pretty boring episode if I just read out a bunch of stats verbatim. So head over to bit.ly/brightlocal-review-survey-2025 to read the whole thing.
That’s all the time we have left for this week’s episode, so you know what that means. Put your hand on the screen right here: We totally just high-fived ‘cause you learned something awesome. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.
