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Google review rating calculator
Put in your rating and your review count. See what happens to the number if the bad ones come down, how many five-star reviews it would take to get to the same place, and what the next one-star will cost you.
If those 3 come down
4.4
from 4.2, a gain of 0.2
The same gain by collecting instead
16
new five-star reviews to land in the same place
To reach 4.5 by collecting
36
consecutive five-star reviews, with no new negatives in between
What one more one-star costs
−0.1
off your average, from a single new review
This is arithmetic on your own numbers, not a projection. Google rounds the average to one decimal, so your true average sits within half a review of the figure you entered and the results move a little with it. It also assumes the reviews you counted actually break a published policy, which is the part worth checking first.
Volume decides which fix is available to you
This is the single most useful thing the arithmetic shows, and almost nobody says it out loud because it costs the person saying it money.
On a listing with 40 reviews, three one-star reviews are holding your average down hard, and taking them off moves the displayed number immediately. On a listing with 1,200 reviews, the same three are arithmetically irrelevant. Removing them is still worth doing if they are defamatory or name a staff member, because the words matter to whoever reads them, but nobody should sell it to you as a way to raise the star rating. It will not.
Run both numbers first. If the equivalent-fives figure is small, the reviews holding you down are not really the constraint and removal is the wrong tool for the job. If it is large, they are the constraint, and the only question left is whether they break a rule Google publishes. That is the one worth getting right the first time, because a report Google has already declined is much harder to win on a second attempt.
The rounding trap
Google displays one decimal place. A listing whose true average is 4.449 shows as 4.4, and a removal that lifts it to 4.462 shows as 4.5, the same size of change that would have been invisible a week earlier. This is why two owners can do the same thing and one sees the number jump while the other sees nothing at all.
It is also why the honest way to talk about a removal is in terms of what came off the listing, not in terms of a promised star figure. Anyone quoting you a rating you will end up at is guessing at a rounding boundary they cannot see.
What the star number is actually worth
The rating is not the only thing a buyer reads. Recency, the wording of the worst review sitting at the top of your listing, and whether the owner replied are all part of what a buyer takes in, and none of them show up in the average. A reply under the harshest review is the cheapest thing on that list and the only one entirely in your hands.
Which is a way of saying: fix the number where the number is the problem, and fix the reading where the reading is.
Questions about the maths
How is a Google star rating calculated?
It behaves as the plain mean of every star on the listing, displayed to one decimal place. Ten five-star reviews and one one-star review average 4.6. The displayed figure does not appear to fade older reviews out, which is why an old bad review keeps costing you for as long as it stays up.
How many five-star reviews do I need to cancel out a one-star?
It depends entirely on how many reviews you already have, which is what the calculator is for. On a listing with 20 reviews a single one-star is heavy and a handful of fives absorbs it. On a listing with 800 it barely registers, and neither does the fix. Volume is what decides whether removal or collection is the faster route.
Does removing a review raise my rating straight away?
The average recalculates once the review is gone, and the displayed figure follows. Whether the change is visible depends on rounding: a listing sitting at 4.41 shows as 4.4, and a removal that lifts it to 4.44 still shows as 4.4. The gain is real and the number on the listing has not moved. The calculator flags that case, because it is the most common source of disappointment after a removal.
Is it better to remove bad reviews or collect good ones?
Collecting is better whenever the negatives are genuine, because a real customer's review cannot be removed by anyone and trying is wasted effort. Removal is better when the reviews break a published policy and your listing is small enough that a few of them are holding the number down. The two numbers side by side in the calculator usually make the answer obvious.
Why does my rating not match the average I calculated?
The figure Google shows is rounded to one decimal, so your true average sits somewhere either side of it and a hand calculation will rarely land exactly on the same number. Any review Google has taken down also stops counting the moment it disappears, and the count you are dividing by changes with it.
Free to link to
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Before you count a review as removable
These are the clauses Google publishes. A review that breaks none of them stays up, whatever the arithmetic says it is costing you.
Straight answers
One question per page, answered directly.
By trade
What the review pattern looks like in your industry, and which clause it usually breaks.
RepuShield is not affiliated with Google or Alphabet. Google decides every removal.