Why review sites disagree about your business

You have 4.8 on Google. Then somebody mentions they saw you on a review site you'd forgotten existed, and you look, and there you are with 3.1 and four reviews, two of which are about a job you don't remember doing. Somewhere else a listing has your old address and a two-star rating from 2019. Nothing you can see explains how these can all be about the same business.

This happens to almost every small business eventually, and it is one of those problems that feels like it must have a villain. It usually doesn't. It has four fairly boring causes, and once you know which one you're looking at, most of them are fixable in an afternoon.

The scores are measuring different crowds

The first cause is the simplest. Different sites collect reviews from different people, at different moments, under different amounts of effort.

Google collects from everyone, because everyone already has an account and the box appears without being asked for. It skews towards ordinary customers having an ordinary experience.

A specialist review site collects from people who went looking for it. Nobody creates an account on a niche directory to say "fine, no complaints". They do it when something went badly, or occasionally when something went brilliantly. The middle of your customer base is missing, which is why those scores are so often lower and so much more dramatic.

Booking platforms collect automatically, after every job, whether the customer cared or not. That produces a lot of four stars and very little text.

So a 4.8 and a 3.1 can both be true. They are answers to slightly different questions asked of slightly different rooms.

Small numbers move violently

The second cause is arithmetic, and it catches people out because we all read a star rating as if it were a measurement.

One bad review out of four gives you 3.1. One bad review out of eighty barely moves the needle. The same unhappy customer, the same complaint, and a difference of nearly two stars depending on which page they happened to land on.

That means a low score on a site with five reviews is not evidence about your business. It is evidence about that site's sample size. It still matters, because strangers don't do that arithmetic, but it tells you what to do: the fix for a thin page with a bad average is a few more real reviews, not an argument about the bad one.

Half of those listings, you never made

The third cause surprises people the most. Many directories build listings automatically, pulling your name, number and address from other sources, without anybody at your business ever signing up.

That's how a page for your business can exist with an address you moved out of in 2019, a phone number that rings somebody else, and opening hours from an old website. Nobody is being malicious. A machine copied a record from another machine, and the record was old.

These are worth finding for a reason beyond the rating. When somebody — or something — is trying to work out whether you're open on a Saturday and finds three different answers, the safest thing to do is show a different business. Disagreement doesn't make you look inconsistent. It makes you look uncertain, and uncertain businesses get skipped.

And some of it genuinely isn't you

Common names produce mixed listings. Two roofers with the same surname in the same county, a franchise that shares your trading name, a business that used your number before you did. It happens more than you'd expect, and it accounts for a surprising share of reviews that describe work nobody at your firm has ever done.

Most sites have a route for this, and it is usually slower and more tedious than it should be. Report, claim, wait. Get on with other things while you wait.

The audit that sorts most of it in an afternoon

Do this once and you'll know exactly which of the four causes you're dealing with.

1. Search your business name in an ordinary browser window, signed out. Go three pages deep, which feels excessive and is where the forgotten listings live.
2. Search your phone number on its own. This finds the listings that don't carry your name properly.
3. Write down every page you find: the site, the rating, the number of reviews, and whether the details are right.
4. Mark each one as claimed, unclaimed, or not-you.

Now you can act. Claim the ones that matter and fix the details. Report the ones that aren't you. And for the rest — the thin pages on sites your customers have never heard of — deliberately do nothing. Chasing a 3.1 on a directory nobody in your trade uses is a week you'll never get back.

Make the underlying facts agree, then let the scores differ

Ratings will never match across sites and that's fine. What should match is everything factual: name, address, phone number, opening hours, the area you cover, what you actually do.

That's the part that quietly decides whether you get found, and it's the part that drifts, because those details live in a dozen places and only ever get changed in one. Keep a single note — a document, a pinned message to yourself, anything — with the exact wording you use for each of those. When something changes, you update the note first and then work through the list. It sounds bureaucratic for a two-person business. It takes ten minutes a year and prevents the slow rot that makes you look shut.

There's a second half to it that's easier to miss. Getting the facts to agree is one thing; being able to answer the questions those facts don't cover is another. Whether you'll take on a job that size, what a call-out costs, whether you do evenings. That's what hailera does — you write those answers yourself, check them, and publish them as an agent your site and the AI apps people ask can read straight, so there's one version instead of four half-versions scattered across directories. The note and the plain page get you most of the way for nothing, though, so do those before you look at anything else.

What to tell a customer who mentions the bad one

Occasionally somebody will bring it up. "I saw you had a couple of two stars somewhere." The instinct is to explain the whole mess.

Don't. Say the true short version: that page has four reviews and one of them is from a job that wasn't ours, and here's the Google page with the rest. Then move on. Defensiveness costs you more than the two stars ever did.

Today: search your business name signed out, three pages deep, and write down every listing you find. You will find at least one you'd forgotten.

Written by the team at hailera — we help small businesses answer customer questions without being there.