Most HVAC contractors ignore their Google reviews: what 135,402 profiles reveal

A homeowner comparing two HVAC contractors on Google reads more than the star rating. They read whether the business bothered to reply, and how it replied, to the last few people who left a review. So we measured that directly: for 135,402 HVAC business profiles across the United States and Canada, we pulled the 10 most recent Google reviews on each one in July 2026 and recorded which reviews got an owner response and how long that response took.¹

The short version: most HVAC businesses do not answer their reviews, and the ones that do are slow. Only 26.7% of profiles had responded to any of their 10 most recent reviews, and just 18.7% had responded to at least half of them.¹

Put the other way: roughly three in four HVAC profiles left every one of their newest reviews unanswered. That is not a small tail of neglected listings. It is the default.

Even the owners who reply are slow

Responding at all is only half the story; timing is the rest. For every profile that replied to at least one review, we took its median days-to-respond and looked at the distribution. Among profiles that responded at all, the median reply landed 23 days after the review.¹

Only 4.5% of responders reply within a day, and under a quarter reply within a week. More than 40% of the profiles that respond take longer than a month. The same-day or same-week reply a homeowner reads as "this business is paying attention" is genuinely rare: about 6% of all profiles show a sub-week response pattern across their newest reviews.

Bigger operations answer more, and faster

Response behavior scales with size, and not only because big shops have more staff. A naive cut of the data would mislead here: a 1,000-review business accumulates its 10 newest reviews in days, while a 10-review business might take years, so their "median days to respond" are not measured over the same window. To make the comparison fair, we restricted this view to the 50,006 profiles whose 10 sampled reviews all arrived within a single year.¹

The gradient compresses under that control but it holds: comparable-velocity profiles with 1,000 or more reviews respond 46.9% of the time with a 1.1-day median, against 33.0% and a 16.3-day median for those under 50 reviews. Responsiveness is a behavior a small shop can copy, and the cheapest way to look like a bigger, busier operation.

US vs Canada

The pattern is broadly the same on both sides of the border, with one twist: Canadian profiles respond a little more often but take noticeably longer to do it.

Canadian profiles responded to a recent review 29.4% of the time against 26.5% in the US, but their median reply time was 32.3 days versus 22.4.¹

One more pattern is worth naming without over-reading it: the lowest-rated profiles also respond the least. Profiles under 3.0 stars responded 10.8% of the time, against about 32% at 4.5 to 4.7 stars.¹ It is a correlation, not a cause, and it means the businesses with the most to gain from a thoughtful public reply are the quietest.

What this means for a contractor

The gap here is an opportunity, because the bar is on the floor. A homeowner reading a profile in real time sees the silence, not the eventual reply. Three things follow:

• Answer your newest reviews, this week. Simply replying to your last month of reviews, positive and negative, already puts you ahead of the roughly three quarters of profiles that answer none. For the review-quality side of this, see why recency and detail outrank star count.
• Reply inside a week. The median responder takes 23 days and only about 6% of profiles reply within a week, so a same-week habit is a genuine differentiator, not table stakes. It is also a free signal that the listing is actively maintained; see the map-pack analysis.
• Make it a system, not a mood. A saved set of owner-response templates (service mistake, quote miscommunication, scheduling failure, and a warm thank-you) turns a 20-minute chore into a two-minute one. The review loop is also a named step in your marketing attribution; see the closed-loop ROI post and the 15-minute Google Business Profile audit.

Owner responses are also public, indexable, first-party business language in your own voice, the kind of text that is thin on the ground when an assistant like ChatGPT assembles a local recommendation; see what ChatGPT actually reads. Almost nobody writes it. That is the whole point.

How we measured this

The dataset is a single July 2026 sample. For every one of 135,402 US and Canadian HVAC business profiles (110,115 distinct companies after deduplicating multi-location profiles), we pulled the 10 most recent Google reviews, about 1.35 million review slots in total, and recorded for each review whether it carried an owner response and the timestamp of that response.¹

• Unit. The unit of analysis is a Google Business Profile (a location), not a company; we say "companies" only for the deduplicated count of 110,115.
• Response rate. A profile "responds" if at least one of its sampled reviews carries an owner reply; "responds to most" means at least half of them.
• Response time. Per profile, we take the median days from review to owner response, and report medians across responders only (a profile with no responses has no response time). About 4% of responders had no usable review-to-response timestamp pair and are excluded from the timing figures.
• Velocity control. Because a busy shop's 10 newest reviews span days while a slow shop's span years, raw response-time medians are not comparable across sizes. The size-gradient chart restricts to profiles whose full 10 reviews arrived within 365 days.
• Scope and limits. This is the newest 10 reviews per profile, not a business's entire review history, so it measures current response behavior rather than lifetime totals. It covers US and Canadian HVAC contractor profiles only. We store review and response timestamps and counts; we do not store or quote any review text.