Most groups watch the star average. Patients check the date first.
A woman comparing therapists for weekly sessions spends an evening on it. Two offices, both sitting at 4.7. One profile's newest review went up last Tuesday, written by someone whose situation sounds like hers. The other's newest is 14 months old.
She books last Tuesday's. Care quality did not decide it. A year of silence reads as a practice that may be winding down. She is choosing someone she will see every week.
We'd argue recency is the trust signal that decides relationship care, and it is the one most groups never look at.
Recency now ranks with the rating itself. BrightLocal surveyed 1,002 US consumers in 2026. Of those, 44% named “posted within the last month” as a trust factor, and 18% trust only reviews from the last week.
Apply that to a medical office. A 4.9 average built entirely in 2023 tells a careful researcher that people were happy two years ago. It says nothing about who works there now.
Silence gets read as information. Patients fill the gap with a guess, and the guess is rarely generous.
Your founding office's 214 reviews never appear in a near me search decision made three neighborhoods away. Google Maps returns the location, and the location carries its own evidence or it does not.
That is why patient acquisition Google Maps performance splits so sharply inside one group. Same brand, same protocols, three completely different first impressions depending on which pin the patient tapped.
Specialty patients research hardest of all. Someone choosing a therapist or a PT for a long rehab is picking a relationship. Therapist research careful patients do runs to reading dates, cross-referencing names, and checking who replied.
Nothing here requires better care. It requires the evidence to arrive at the same pace the care does.
One review from six days ago at the office she is considering beats fifty from 2021 at your original site. Recency and location have to land together, which is why routing matters as much as volume.
Post-Visit Review Requests reach patients while the visit is still specific. What comes back sounds like patients rather than marketing, because it is patients, describing the office they actually attended.
Responding is visible work. Keep replies free of PHI and never confirm that someone is a patient. A short thank-you, or a line offering to sort something out offline, reads as an attentive practice to everyone scrolling past.
Post-Visit Review Requests fire from real appointment activity and send each patient to the Google profile for the office she visited. Two taps from text to posted review, so the path is short enough that people finish it.
Because requests follow actual visits, each office's review stream mirrors its own patient flow. A Google profile first impression practice leaders can be proud of gets built out of ordinary Tuesdays rather than a campaign.
Responses run per office from one dashboard. The same channel handles the reminders patients so often praise, covered in keeping every reminder on one dependable schedule.
|
What she checks |
Stale profile |
Living profile |
|
Newest review |
14 months ago |
6 days ago |
|
Reviews in the last quarter |
0 |
19 |
|
Practice replies |
None visible |
Within 2 days |
|
Her read on it |
Maybe winding down |
Busy and current |
Columns are illustrative. The one to check tonight is the first row, for every office you run.
Review recency trust compounds without anyone managing it. Every ordinary week of visits refreshes the top of each profile, so the newest date stays measured in days.
One multi-location practice on Curogram collected 1,064 new 5-star reviews in three months, based on our internal data. What matters is what that volume did to the dates. No office in the group had a stale top-of-page for a single week.
Patients then arrive already reassured. They chose on evidence, which is a better start to a long care relationship than hoping the website was accurate. More on how the whole system works across sites sits in running review generation across every office you own.
Check the date on each office's most recent review right now. That date is the age of your first impression in that neighborhood. For a patient deciding on weekly care, it outweighs your average.
Your offices earn deep trust weekly. Their profiles should show it weekly, and the only way that happens reliably is if ordinary visits keep feeding them.
Book a demo. We will show you how one busy Tuesday at a single office turns into a week of fresh local reviews on its profile.