Almost everyone reads reviews now. BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey puts it at 97% of consumers reading reviews before choosing a local business, against 29% a decade ago. Reading reviews is no longer a behaviour of careful shoppers. It is simply what choosing looks like.
Which makes the interesting question not whether people read, but what they do with the number once they have it. That is where volume comes in, and where most teams misread their own dashboard.
Volume is a confidence interval, not a score
A 4.8 from nine reviews and a 4.5 from four hundred are not the same claim, and customers treat them differently without being able to explain why.
Nine reviews is a sample small enough that a single bad shift, a single enthusiastic friend, or a single unlucky week would move it visibly. Four hundred reviews is a sample where nothing short of a real operational change moves anything. Readers do not run that calculation consciously. They just find the second number more believable, and the research on how people weigh small samples says they are right to.
So volume does not raise your rating. It raises the weight your rating carries.
The three things volume actually buys
Recovery room. With 40 reviews, one angry one-star costs you roughly a tenth of a star and sits near the top of the page for weeks. With 400, the same review costs a hundredth of a star and is buried by the next fortnight. Volume is the cheapest insurance against a single bad day.
Recency. Most people read the first handful and stop. A business collecting reviews steadily always has recent ones on top, which reads as open and currently trading. A business that collected 200 reviews three years ago and none since reads as closed, whatever the average says.
Specificity. Ten reviews describe an experience. Three hundred describe a business. Somewhere in a large pile there is a review mentioning the exact thing a given reader cares about, whether that is parking, wheelchair access, or how it handles a late check-in.
Where teams get this wrong
The common failure is chasing volume as a target in itself, which produces two predictable problems.
The first is soliciting selectively. Asking only the customers you expect to be happy inflates the average and produces a pattern readers pick up on quickly: uniformly glowing reviews, no texture, no complaints about anything. That reads as bought, and on most platforms it is against policy as well.
The second is a burst. Forty reviews in one week after two quiet years does not look like momentum. It looks like a campaign, both to readers and to the platform's own filtering, which is one of the reliable ways to have reviews removed.
Steady beats large. A business adding ten honest reviews a month ends the year in a stronger position than one that added a hundred in March.
A workable target
There is no universal number, but there is a usable test. Look at the four or five competitors a customer would realistically be choosing between. If your count is in the same order of magnitude as theirs, volume is no longer your constraint and you should be working on the experience instead. If you have 30 and they have 600, volume is your constraint, and no amount of reply polish will fix it.
Then measure the thing that matters, which is not the count. It is what share of customers who finish a transaction end up leaving a review. That number is usually somewhere between 1 and 5%, it is fully under your control, and doubling it is a far more honest goal than a target on the total.