How Many Google Reviews Do You Actually Need in Vernon or Kelowna? We Measured 580 Okanagan Businesses. The Answer Runs From 7 to 222.

Every local business owner in this valley has been told to get more Google reviews. Almost nobody has been told how many. The advice arrives as a verb with no number attached, which makes it impossible to know whether you are behind, ahead, or already finished.

So we measured it. On September 11, 2026 we pulled the ranked search results for 16 home service trades across Vernon, Kelowna, West Kelowna and Penticton, recorded the Google review count of every business that appeared, and looked at what the businesses in the top three slots were actually carrying.

The short version: there is no review number. There is only your trade's number, and in this valley it runs from 7 to 222. An excavating contractor and a heating company are competing in the same towns, on the same search engine, against fields that differ by close to 32 times. If you are using a general rule of thumb, it is wrong for almost everyone.

The second finding is the one that changed how we read the first. In 46 of the 58 searches we could test, the business sitting in the number one position was not the most reviewed business in its own result list. Reviews look much more like a floor you have to clear than a lever you keep pulling.

What We Measured, and What We Did Not

We ran 64 searches, one for each of 16 trades in each of four Okanagan towns, through the Google Places API. That returned 967 result slots. After removing 148 slots belonging to suppliers and retailers, which is the same filter we used for our census of 314 Okanagan Google profiles in August, we were left with 580 unique service businesses. For each one we recorded its position, its lifetime Google review count and its rating.

Four limits matter, and they matter enough that we are putting them before the findings rather than in a footnote at the bottom.

This is not the Map Pack. What we measured is the ranked list of local businesses the API returns for a search, which is the same kind of ordering you see when you expand local results. It is not the three business cards that appear at the top of a normal Google search. The two are related and they are not the same thing, so we describe our own measurement as top three results, never as the map pack.

Distance is a confound we could not control. Google names three local ranking factors: relevance, distance and prominence. A nearer business with fewer reviews outranking a farther business with more reviews is not an anomaly, it is Google working as documented. When we report that the top result often is not the most reviewed, some unknown share of that is simply proximity. We cannot separate the two with this data, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

Correlation is not causation. Nothing here shows that buying or earning reviews moves you up. Google is blunt about this in its own documentation: "There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking."

This is one sample, from one point in time, from one searcher location. Local results shift depending on where the person searching is standing. A measurement taken in a different month, or from a different spot in town, would differ at the edges. We also excluded flooring from the table below, because once retailers were stripped out only two usable top three slots remained across all four towns. A thin number printed confidently is worse than no number.

There Is No Review Number. There Is Only Your Trade's Number.

Here is the core result. The second column is the median review count of the top three results for that trade, pooled across all four towns. Treat it as the size of the field you are walking into. The remaining columns break it out by town, and the table scrolls sideways on a phone.

The spread is the finding. Heating and air conditioning sits at 222. Excavating sits at 7. Both are legitimate trades with real customers in the same four towns, and the competitive review field for one is roughly 32 times the other.

This is why generic advice fails. If you run an excavating company in Penticton and someone tells you to chase 100 reviews, they have sent you after a target that is five times what anyone at the top of your market actually holds. That is a year of effort aimed at a problem you do not have. If you run an HVAC company in West Kelowna, where the top three carry a median of 317, the same advice is wildly short and will leave you wondering why nothing moved.

The trades cluster in a way that makes intuitive sense once you see it. Emergency and recurring services, where a homeowner calls several times over a decade and the job is unpleasant enough to write about, sit at the top: heating and air conditioning, plumbing, pest control. Project trades that a homeowner hires once and where the customer is often a builder rather than a homeowner sit at the bottom: excavating, concrete, fencing. Review volume tracks how often an ordinary person has a reason to leave one.

Kelowna's Bar Is Nearly Three Times Vernon's, and That Cuts Both Ways

Pooling every trade, the four towns separate cleanly.

A top three slot in Kelowna typically sits behind 101.5 reviews. In Vernon it is 36.5. That is a factor of close to three, and it lines up with what we found in August when we counted every business in both cities and saw a Vernon median of 12 against Kelowna's 37. The gap at the top mirrors the gap in the population.

For a Vernon business this is genuinely good news, and it is the opposite of how the gap usually gets framed. A smaller review field means the cost of entry into your own town is lower. Thirty six reviews is a realistic year of asking every satisfied customer. One hundred is a different project.

The interesting part is that the pattern does not hold trade by trade, which is exactly why the pooled city number is not the one to plan against. Garage door repair in Vernon has a top three bar of 7. In Kelowna it is 241, which is 34 times higher. Plumbing runs 242 in Vernon against 997 in Kelowna. And tree service inverts the whole thing: Vernon's bar is 107 and Kelowna's is 37.

So "bigger city, higher bar" is a decent rule of thumb and a bad plan. Your market is a trade in a town, not a town. Find the cell in the table, not the row average and not the column average.

One more number worth carrying: 14 percent of the top three slots we measured were held by a business whose listed address was not in the town being searched. That is consistent with what we found when we checked 869 Okanagan search results in August, and it is a reminder that some of the field you are measuring yourself against is not local at all.

In 79 Percent of Searches, the Top Result Was Not the Most Reviewed Business

If review count decided position, the results would come back sorted by review count. They do not.

We compared 5,567 pairs of results within their own searches, asking each time whether the business in the higher position had more reviews than the one below it. It did 59.7 percent of the time. But 38.6 percent of the pairs were inversions, meaning the business further down the list had more reviews than the one above it. Pure review sorting would produce almost no inversions at all.

The sharpest way to say it: in 46 of the 58 searches that returned enough results to test, roughly 79 percent, the business at number one was not the most reviewed business in its own list.

At the same time, reviews clearly are not irrelevant. The top three results carried a median of 44 reviews. Positions four and below carried 19. The businesses at the top hold about 2.3 times the reviews of the pack beneath them.

Both things are true, and together they describe a filter rather than a lever. Enough reviews appears to be part of what puts you in contention. More reviews than the business beside you does not appear to be what decides the order. Some of the gap between those two statements is distance, which we could not measure, and that is a real limitation rather than a rhetorical hedge.

This is also why we are not arguing with the case for review recency. A lifetime review count is the only thing this dataset contains, and a profile with 300 reviews that all stopped arriving in 2023 is telling a different story to a customer than one with 60 that arrived this year. Volume describes the field. It does not describe how alive you look in it.

For the record, Google's own documentation supports the modest version of the claim rather than either extreme. It states that prominence "is also based on info like how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have," and that "more reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking." Can help. Not decides.

One in Four Top Three Slots Belongs to a Business With Under 20 Reviews

Of the 182 top three slots we measured, 49 were held by a business with fewer than 20 reviews. That is 26.9 percent, better than one in four.

Two of those slots were held by businesses showing zero reviews: a roofing company in Vernon and a garage door company in Penticton, both sitting in the top three of their market's results with nothing in the review column at all.

We are not going to tell you exactly why, because we did not measure it and inventing a mechanism would be worse than admitting the gap. What we can say is that Google lists relevance and distance alongside prominence, so a profile that matches the search closely and sits near the person searching is the reasonable explanation for a listing that ranks without social proof.

The practical consequence matters more than the explanation. If you are new, or you are in one of the low bar trades, the review count is not the wall you have been told it is. Three of the 15 trades in the table above have a top three bar under 25 reviews: concrete at 13, fencing at 22 and excavating at 7. In those markets a focused month of asking customers puts you level with the field.

What to Do With Your Trade's Number

The whole point of measuring this is to turn an open ended instruction into a finite task. Here is the order we would work in.

Find your cell in the table. Your trade, your town. That is the number you are competing with, not the number in a national blog post and not the number your neighbour in a different trade quotes at you.

Count what you have and work out the gap. If you are within range of your trade's bar, reviews are not your bottleneck and more of them will not fix your ranking. That is the most valuable thing this table can tell you, because it frees up the effort. If you are at 8 reviews in a market whose bar is 200, you have found a real problem and you should start now, because that gap is measured in years rather than weeks.

Do the free profile work either way. Relevance is the factor you have the most direct control over and it costs nothing. A complete profile, the right primary category, your services actually listed, real photos, correct hours. We have written the longer version of this in our guide to ranking in the map pack.

Ask for reviews as a habit, not a campaign. Even in the trades where the bar is low, reviews do a second job that has nothing to do with ranking. They convert the person who has already found you and is deciding between three tabs. Our guide to getting more Google reviews covers the asking part.

If your trade's bar is out of reach this year, compete somewhere else. A Kelowna plumber staring at a field of 997 review businesses is not going to win that fight with review requests. That is the situation where service pages, the surrounding towns where the bar is lower, and paid search do more for you than another review ask. We broke down which Okanagan towns are actually winnable in our Kelowna and Vernon market work, and the build order in our local SEO service starts from exactly this kind of measurement.

The instruction to get more reviews was never wrong. It was just never finished. Now you have the number that finishes it.

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