The median Australian trade business has 18 Google reviews

Half of all Australian trade businesses have fewer than 18 Google reviews. That single number reframes most star ratings you will see.

By trade

The spread is the interesting part. Locksmiths sit at 74 and builders at 8. That mostly reflects how often a household hires each trade, and how likely they are to leave a review afterwards — an emergency callout gets reviewed far more often than a scheduled maintenance visit.

Why volume beats rating

A perfect five stars from four reviews and a 4.6 from three hundred are not comparable numbers, and treating them as one is how directories end up recommending whoever asked their family. This is why the ranking here weights review volume more heavily than review score.

What this data cannot show

We hold counts and averages, not individual reviews with timestamps, so we cannot tell whether a business's reviews arrived steadily or all at once. Forty over six years and forty in a fortnight are identical in this dataset, and the second is far more likely to have been bought. It is published as a limitation rather than implied to be a check that runs.