On 15 September 2026 I searched Google Maps from Grand Rapids for a plumber, a roofer, an HVAC company and an electrician, and wrote down the first ten businesses each time with their rating and review count. The twelve businesses holding top-three spots have anywhere from 22 reviews to 12,142. What all twelve share is a rating of 4.4 or higher.
There is no threshold. Across the twelve top-three spots I measured, review counts ran from 22 to 12,142 with a median of 170. Three of the twelve have fewer than 60 reviews; six have fewer than 120.
Rating is the one thing they all share: every business in a top-three spot is rated 4.4 or higher, and nine of the twelve are at 4.8 or above.
The smallest count that held a top-three spot, by trade: plumbing 224, roofing 78, HVAC 22, electrical 35. Get to 4.4 or better, aim at that number, then keep going, because the leader in your trade usually has hundreds.
The question comes up in almost every first conversation I have with a trade owner: how many reviews do I need before Google puts me in the map pack? Page one of Google answers it with national medians. One 2026 study I read while writing this puts the median at 58 reviews across 453 ranked businesses and the range at “1 review to 4,400” (Jerod Johnson, getfoundguy.com, 3 June 2026, read 15 September 2026). Another post says flatly, “There is no magic review number.” (Vick Antonyan, humblehelp.studio, 28 June 2026, read 15 September 2026). Both are right, and neither tells you what it takes on 28th Street.
So I measured it.
On 15 September 2026 I opened Google Maps from Grand Rapids and searched four phrases: plumber grand rapids mi, roofing company grand rapids mi, hvac company grand rapids mi and electrician grand rapids mi. For each one I recorded the first ten businesses in the order Maps listed them, with the star rating and review count shown on each entry. The map pack you see in a normal Google search is usually the top three of that list.
Two caveats before the table. Maps orders results partly by where you are standing and when you search, so this is one dated reading from one location, not a permanent ranking; your customer in Kentwood sees a different list than I did. And a listing’s position tells you that it ranked, not why.
| Search | #1 | #2 | #3 | Top-10 median | Smallest in top 10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plumber | Bergsma Plumbing 4.9 · 2,286 reviews | Affordable Plumbing 4.5 · 224 | Mr. Rooter 4.7 · 806 | 474 | 72 |
| Roofing company | Performance Roofing & Siding 4.8 · 78 | Great Lakes Building Concepts 4.9 · 229 | Original Roofing Company 4.9 · 117 | 130 | 22 |
| HVAC company | Westshore Mechanical 4.9 · 54 | Pro-Tech Heating & Cooling 4.9 · 1,291 | Glacier Heating and Cooling 5.0 · 22 | 388 | 9 |
| Electrician | AAB Electric 4.4 · 35 | Vredevoogd Heating & Cooling 4.9 · 12,142 | Webb Electric 4.9 · 115 | 48 | 1 |
Read the plumber row on its own and you would conclude reviews are everything: the smallest count in that whole top ten is 72 and the median is 474. Read the HVAC row and you get the opposite lesson. The third spot went to a company with 22 reviews and the seventh to one with 9, while two others in the same ten have more than 1,300. The electrician row is stranger still. The second spot is Vredevoogd Heating & Cooling, an HVAC company with 12,142 reviews, and the list bottoms out at a single review.
| Measure | Twelve top-three spots | All forty listed |
|---|---|---|
| Fewest reviews | 22 | 1 |
| Median reviews | 170 | 218 |
| Most reviews | 12,142 | 12,142 |
| Fewer than 60 reviews | 3 of 12 | 9 of 40 |
| Fewer than 120 reviews | 6 of 12 | 16 of 40 |
| Lowest rating | 4.4 | 4.3 |
Half of the twelve businesses in a top-three spot have 120 reviews or fewer. A quarter have under 60. If the map pack were a review-count contest, that table could not exist: the twelve would sit at the top of each trade’s count ranking, and they do not. Bergsma Plumbing has 2,286 reviews and is first; Grapids Home Services has 5,606 and is eighth for HVAC; McDonald Plumbing has 1,535 and is seventh.
The twelve businesses in the top three have anywhere from 22 reviews to 12,142. Every one of them is rated 4.4 or higher.
What the twelve do share is the rating. Not one is below 4.4, and nine of the twelve are at 4.8 or higher. The only 5.0 in the top three has 22 reviews; the businesses with hundreds all have some less-than-perfect reviews in the mix and rank anyway.
Google publishes a short page on this and it is more useful than most of what is written about it. “Local results are mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity,” it says, and then explains the three under the headings Relevance, Distance and Prominence. Relevance, in Google’s words, is how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for. Distance is how far each business is from the customer who is searching. Prominence “means how well-known a business is,” and the page says that factor is also based on how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have, adding: “More reviews and positive ratings can help your business’s local ranking.” It also says there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. (Google Business Profile Help, Tips to improve your local ranking on Google, read 15 September 2026.)
So reviews live inside one of three factors, and the other two are visible in my tables. Distance alone means my list from one spot in Grand Rapids is not your customer’s list from theirs, and it is a plausible reason a 22-review roofer can list above a 437-review one. Relevance is the likeliest explanation for an HVAC company surfacing for electrician: Maps matched what that profile says it does to the words I typed. I cannot see inside Google’s system, so I will call both of those plausible and no more. What the reading itself supports is narrower and firmer: in this city, review count is one input among several, and rating is the one nobody in the top three has skipped.
Method: Google Maps searched from Grand Rapids on 15 September 2026 for plumber grand rapids mi, roofing company grand rapids mi, hvac company grand rapids mi and electrician grand rapids mi; the first ten businesses recorded in the order Maps listed them, with the rating and review count shown on each entry. Medians are of the ten counts per search; the twelve-spot figures are the top three listings from each of the four searches. One reading, one location, one day.
Google pages quoted, all read 15 September 2026: Tips to improve your local ranking on Google; Tips to get more reviews; Prohibited & Restricted Content from the Maps user-contributed content policy. Third-party posts quoted: Jerod Johnson, getfoundguy.com, 3 June 2026; Vick Antonyan, humblehelp.studio, 28 June 2026.
Take the reading literally and it gives you an order of operations.
First, the rating. Every top-three business is at 4.4 or above, and nine of the twelve are at 4.8 or above. If you are sitting at 4.1 with 90 reviews, more asking is not your first problem; the next twenty reviews need to be good ones, which means fixing whatever the bad ones keep naming. Google’s page puts reviews and positive ratings in the same sentence. The ratings half is not optional.
Second, a first target you can actually see. The smallest review count that held a top-three spot on 15 September was 224 for plumbers, 78 for roofers, 22 for HVAC and 35 for electricians. Those are not thresholds. A business at 30 HVAC reviews is guaranteed nothing. But they are the lowest counts that were sufficient for somebody, today, in this city, and they are a great deal more useful to you than a national median of 58.
Third, keep going, because the leader has hundreds. In three of the four trades the biggest count in the top three is in the hundreds or thousands: 2,286 for plumbing, 229 for roofing, 1,291 for HVAC. Electrical is the exception. The largest count among the three electricians in the top three is 115, and the only two listings above 200 in that whole top ten, Vredevoogd and Amp Electric Heating & Air, both carry heating and air in their names. Across all forty businesses listed, the median is 218. Reaching the smallest sufficient count gets you into the conversation; it does not make you the safe choice against a competitor with ten times your reviews at the same rating.
If your rating is above 4.4, your count is above your trade’s smallest top-three number, and you are still not in the pack, the problem is probably not reviews. It is more likely your primary category, your address, how complete the profile is, or the words on it, which is the relevance and distance side of Google’s page. No amount of asking fixes that.
Whatever count you settle on, the way you get there matters, because Google removes reviews it decides were manufactured and can restrict a profile over it. The rules are short and public.
Sources: Prohibited & Restricted Content (Maps user-contributed content policy) and Tips to get more reviews (Google Business Profile Help), both read 15 September 2026.
Three questions, in order.
There is no fixed number. On 15 September 2026 the twelve businesses holding top-three spots for plumber, roofing company, HVAC company and electrician searches in Grand Rapids had between 22 and 12,142 reviews, with a median of 170. Three of the twelve had fewer than 60. The smallest count that held a top-three spot was 224 for plumbers, 78 for roofers, 22 for HVAC and 35 for electricians. Every one of the twelve was rated 4.4 or higher.
In this reading, rating was the only thing all twelve top-three businesses had in common: none was below 4.4 and nine were at 4.8 or above, while review counts varied from 22 to 12,142. Google's help page says more reviews and positive ratings can help local ranking, so both count. A practical order is rating first, then a steady count.
No. Google's Maps content policy prohibits merchants from offering incentives such as payment, discounts or free goods in exchange for a review, and from discouraging negative reviews or selectively asking only happy customers. Google can remove the reviews and restrict the profile. Ask every customer, give them the link or QR code, and let the review be whatever it is.
On 15 September 2026 the second listing for "electrician grand rapids mi" was Vredevoogd Heating & Cooling, with 12,142 reviews. I cannot see why Google Maps matched it, but Google's help page says relevance is how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for, so what a profile says it does clearly counts. The lesson for a trade owner is that your primary category and listed services are worth getting exactly right.
Send me your business name and your trade. I’ll read the top three for your search from Grand Rapids the same way I did above and send you your rating, your count and the gap, in plain numbers.
Useful whether or not you end up hiring me.