Data
Reviews benchmark by industry: dentists, hotels, salons, e-commerce
A useful reviews benchmark by industry has to compare a business with its own kind, because the normal count and the normal rating move a lot between sectors. Counted on 2026-09-19 for firms with one Google page linked to JustReview, the median dental practice had 104 Google reviews, the median hotel or guest house 99, the median beauty or hair salon 87 and the median online shop just 52, while all other local businesses had 34. Ratings split too: dentists and salons typically show 4.9 stars, hotels 4.7. And for salons and online shops, Google is not even where most of the reviews are.
That last point changes what “benchmark” means. A salon that compares its Google count with a dentist’s is measuring the wrong platform, because its customers review it on Booksy. An online shop that worries about 52 Google reviews may have a few thousand on Amazon or eBay. Below are the counts, the star mix and the source mix for each of the four industries, with the sample size next to every figure so you can judge how much weight each one carries.
How the industries were identified
Nobody tells us their sector when signing up, so we inferred it from two signals, using read-only summary counts from our live systems.
- Dentists, hotels and salons by the firm name on the linked Google page. We matched terms such as dental, dentist, orthodontics, hotel, hostel, guest house, apartments, villa, salon, hair, barber, nails, beauty and massage in several languages, then read every match by hand and removed the false ones. A car body shop that fixes dents is not a dental practice, and a hotel with a spa belongs with hotels.
- Online shops by the sources they connected. A firm counts as a shop when it pulls in reviews from Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Allegro, Trusted Shops, Google Shopping, Reviews.io, Walmart or AliExpress.
For the Google numbers we used firms with a single linked Google page, so a ten-branch group does not masquerade as one giant firm. Our sample account is excluded. Reviews switched off in a widget stay in, since anyone can still read them on Google. The groups: 23 dental practices, 43 hotels and other places to stay, 87 salons with reviews, 100 online shops with a Google profile, and a comparison group of 2,655 other local businesses.
The dental and hotel groups are small. And every firm here signed up for a review widget, so the set leans toward owners who already care about reviews. Treat the rows as a direction, not a standard.
Review counts by industry
| Industry | Profiles | Median Google reviews | Middle half | 90th percentile | Median rating shown | Rated below 4.5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dental practices | 23 | 104 | 24 to 236 | 271 | 4.9 | 0% |
| Hotels and other stays | 43 | 99 | 40 to 149 | 488 | 4.7 | 30.8% |
| Beauty and hair salons | 87 | 87 | 31 to 132 | 365 | 4.9 | 3.9% |
| Online shops | 100 | 52 | 8 to 122 | 379 | 4.8 | 21.6% |
| Other local businesses | 2,655 | 34 | 11 to 98 | 194 | 4.9 | 9.8% |
The rating columns use only profiles with at least 10 reviews, so a two-review profile does not pass for a verdict. The shown rating is the mean of every star on the profile, rounded to one decimal, which is how Google displays it.
Three things stand out. First, all three local service industries sit well above the median of 34 for other local businesses. More than half of the dental practices, 56.5%, have at least 100 Google reviews, against 24.7% of other local businesses. A dentist with 40 reviews is above the median business in town but in the bottom third of dentists. We covered the general picture, without the industry split, in how many reviews a business needs.
Second, hotels have a long tail. The median hotel has 99 reviews, but one in ten has more than 488, and the mean is 218. A large city hotel checks out more guests in a week than a five-room guest house does in a season, so the hotel you are compared with matters more here than anywhere else.
Third, online shops have the thinnest Google profiles: 26.0% have fewer than 10 reviews. That is not a sign of weak shops. It is a sign that their customers review them somewhere else, which is the subject of the next section but one.
Hotels are rated on a harder scale
The count tells you how much proof you need. The star mix tells you what a normal profile looks like up close, and here the industries split far more than their median ratings suggest.
| Industry | Five-star | Four-star | Two or three stars | One star | Profiles with a perfect 5.0 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dental practices | 95.7% | 1.8% | 0.8% | 1.6% | 21.7% |
| Beauty and hair salons | 92.0% | 3.5% | 1.6% | 2.9% | 24.1% |
| Other local businesses | 86.7% | 7.2% | 2.8% | 3.2% | 41.5% |
| Online shops | 79.9% | 8.6% | 3.4% | 8.0% | 31.0% |
| Hotels and other stays | 72.1% | 16.0% | 8.4% | 3.6% | 16.3% |
The table is sorted by the share of five-star reviews, and hotels come last by a wide margin. Guests do not hate hotels. They grade them. A stay has many parts, from the bed to breakfast to the noise from the street, and a guest who liked most of it writes four stars rather than five. Hotels receive almost twice the share of four-star reviews of any other group, and three times the share of two and three star reviews that other local businesses get. That is why the median hotel shows 4.7 and why 30.8% of hotels sit below 4.5.
Dental practices are the opposite case. Almost every review is five stars, and a two or three star review is rarer than a one-star review. Patients who are unhappy tend to be very unhappy, and everyone else gives full marks. Online shops show the same pattern at a larger scale: their one-star share on Google is 8.0%, two and a half times that of other local businesses. On a shop’s Google profile, a complaint about a late parcel is usually a one-star review.
The practical reading: judge your rating against your own row. A 4.5 hotel is close to its peers. A 4.5 dental practice would tie for the lowest of the 23 in our set. If you want the mechanics of why a small profile so often shows a perfect score, does a 5-star rating hurt conversion walks through it.
Where each industry’s reviews actually live
Google is the default benchmark, but it is not the main review platform for every industry. This table counts every imported review on the accounts in each group, across all the sources they connected.
| Group | Accounts | Largest source on most accounts | Share of all their reviews |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dental practices | 23 | Google on 23 of 23 | Google 93.1%, Facebook 6.9% |
| Salons with Booksy connected | 31 | Booksy on 29 of 31 | Booksy 74.3%, Google 9.9%, other 15.8% |
| Stays with Booking.com or Airbnb connected | 28 | Airbnb on 10, Google on 9, Booking.com on 6 | Google 42.1%, Booking.com 27.0%, Airbnb 14.8%, other 16.1% |
| Shops with a marketplace connected | 281 | Amazon on 81, eBay on 68, Allegro on 50 | Amazon 40.4%, Allegro 22.4%, eBay 22.2%, Etsy 5.9%, Google 4.9% |
Salons: Booksy outweighs Google almost five to one
Fifteen salons connected both Booksy and Google. The median one had 900 Booksy reviews and 154 Google reviews, and Booksy was the larger source on 14 of the 15. The tone differs as well: 98.4% of the Booksy reviews on these accounts are five stars, against 92.0% of salon reviews on Google. A salon benchmarking itself on Google alone is looking at roughly a fifth of its proof. If that is you, Booksy reviews on your website explains how to put the rest in front of visitors, and the Booksy reviews widget does it without copying anything by hand.
Stays: three platforms, none dominant
Places to stay are the only group where no single platform wins. Among the 13 accounts with both a Google profile and Booking.com or Airbnb reviews, the median had 69 reviews on the booking platforms and 40 on Google, and the booking platforms were larger on 7 of the 13. The scales differ too. Booking.com rates stays out of 10, and in our import a 9 becomes 4.5 stars, so only 52.4% of the Booking.com reviews on these accounts count as five stars, against 82.0% of their Google reviews and 90.4% on Airbnb. A Booking.com score and a Google score for the same property are not comparable at a glance, which is one reason to show both with their source labels. The details for the platform are in adding Booking.com reviews to your website.
Online shops: Google holds under 5% of the reviews
For shops the gap is widest. Of 92 shops with both a Google profile and marketplace reviews, the median had 459 marketplace reviews and about 52 on Google, the marketplace was larger on 75 of them, and the median shop had 9.8 times more reviews on marketplaces than on Google. Marketplace ratings also come on their own scales. On these accounts eBay feedback averages 4.96 and Allegro 4.97, because both platforms work closer to a thumbs up than a star scale, while Amazon averages 4.31 with 17.8% of reviews at three stars or less. Comparing a shop’s Amazon rating with its eBay rating tells you about the platforms, not about the shop. Marketplace reviews on your website covers which of them you may show and how.
Dentists: Google or nothing
Dental practices are the simplest case. Google was the largest source on all 23 accounts and held 93.1% of their reviews, and only 5 of the 23 connected anything else, always Facebook. For a practice, the Google profile is the benchmark, and the numbers in the first table are the ones to beat.
How to use these benchmarks
- Pick the right row. Compare your count and rating with your industry, not with the general median. A 4.7 means something different for a hotel than for a dentist.
- Pick the right platform. Salons should count Booksy first, stays should add Booking.com and Airbnb together, and shops should count marketplace feedback. Google alone understates all three.
- Aim for the middle half, then the median. Below the 25th percentile of your row, getting more reviews beats anything else you could do this month. Above the median, keep the flow steady so your newest review is recent.
- Show the reviews where they add up. When most of your reviews sit on one platform and your site links to another, visitors see the smaller number. Several sources can sit in one widget, as shown in one widget for multiple review sources.
Limits of this data
This is a snapshot from 2026-09-19. Industry was inferred from business names and connected sources, so a dental practice with a name that gives nothing away is counted with the other local businesses, and a salon without Booksy appears only in the Google rows. The dental and hotel groups are small, 23 and 43 profiles. Counts on accounts whose Google connection stopped syncing reflect the day it stopped. We also tried to measure how fast each industry collects reviews, but only 4 dental practices and 7 hotels in the set have a live connection and a widget in active use, which is too few for a per-industry pace. The general pace figure is in the review count article linked above.
Showing your industry’s reviews on your own site
The reason to benchmark is to decide what proof a visitor should see before they book or buy. JustReview imports the full review history from Google through the owner API and from Booksy, Booking.com, Airbnb, Amazon, eBay and other platforms, and shows them together on your site with each source labelled. The Google reviews widget is the starting point for dentists and most local businesses. Salons, stays and shops will want their booking platform or marketplace next to it, such as the eBay reviews widget or the Booking.com reviews widget.
The free Basic plan covers up to 100 reviews from Google and Facebook with the badge widget, which covers the median Google profile in every row above except dental practices, where the median is 104. Booksy, Booking.com, Airbnb and marketplace sources need a paid plan, and paid plans start at 9 EUR a month. The tiers and the sources each one includes are on pricing, and you can create a free account to see how your own profile compares with the rows above.
One caveat before you do. A widget shows the reviews you have, it does not create new ones. If your count is below the middle half of your row, a review link sent after each visit or order will move you further this month than any display choice.
FAQ
How many Google reviews does a dental practice usually have?
In our measurement from 2026-09-19, the median dental practice among 23 single-location practices connected to JustReview had 104 Google reviews. The middle half of practices sat between 24 and 236, and the mean was 159 because a few large clinics pull it up. None of the 23 practices had fewer than 10 reviews. It is a small sample, so read it as a direction: a practice with 40 reviews is below its peers even though 40 would be above the median for local businesses in general.
What is a normal Google rating for a hotel?
Lower than for most other businesses. Among 39 hotels, guest houses and holiday rentals with at least 10 Google reviews, the median displayed rating was 4.7, and 30.8% showed less than 4.5. Only 72.1% of their Google reviews were five stars, against 86.7% for local businesses outside the four industries we measured, and 16.0% were four stars. A hotel at 4.5 is therefore close to normal for its category, while the same 4.5 on a dental practice would tie for the lowest in our set.
Where do beauty salons get most of their reviews?
On their booking platform, not on Google. Across 31 salon accounts that connected Booksy to JustReview, Booksy held 74.3% of all their imported reviews and Google 9.9%. Booksy was the largest source on 29 of the 31 accounts. For the 15 salons that connected both, the median salon had 900 Booksy reviews and 154 on Google, so a salon that shows only its Google profile leaves most of its proof off the page.