You’ll never get to survey a competitor’s customers directly — but you don’t need to. Their public reviews are, in effect, an ongoing survey their own customers already filled out. Reading it correctly just takes knowing which signal to look at.
The simple split
A useful rough estimate: treat 5-star reviews as customers who’d likely recommend the business, and 1-to-3-star reviews as customers who probably wouldn’t. It’s not a formal methodology — it’s a fast way to turn a wall of stars into one directional number. A competitor sitting at 70% five-star reviews with very few 1-to-3-star ratings is running a fundamentally healthier business than one at 70% five-star with a heavy tail of 1-and-2-star reviews mixed in, even if their overall average looks similar at a glance.
Why the average alone hides this
Two competitors can both show a 4.3-star average and mean completely different things by it. One might be mostly 4s and 5s with the occasional 3. The other might be a pile of 5-star reviews dragged down by a handful of furious 1-star ones — a much more polarizing business, and a much bigger opportunity if you can be the more consistent option. The average is the headline; the actual distribution is the story.
Walking through it
Pull up a competitor’s last 20-30 reviews. Count roughly how many are 5-star, how many are 4-star, and how many are 3-star-or-below. If the bulk sits at 5 with almost nothing below a 4, that’s a strong, consistent operation — hard to out-position on reputation alone, so your edge will need to come from somewhere else (price, availability, a service they don’t offer). If there’s a real cluster of low ratings mixed in, read those specifically: they usually cluster around one recurring issue — late arrivals, pricing surprises, a specific bad experience — and that’s your most concrete opening.
Where this breaks down
This only works as a rough directional read, not a precise score. A competitor with 15 total reviews can look great or terrible based on two or three people’s experience — there isn’t enough volume yet for the pattern to mean much. And a business that fixed a real problem eight months ago is still dragging an average down from reviews written before the fix. Read the dates, not just the stars.
Skip the manual count
Reveo’s free Rating Gap Calculator and Industry Benchmark already compute the aggregate picture — rating, volume, and how you compare — without you counting stars by hand. This manual read is worth knowing because it’s the “why” behind the number; the tools are worth using because they do it automatically, for every competitor, every time you check.
