How many Google reviews does it take to reach the map pack top three? We measured 434 electricians

Ask an electrical contractor why they are not in the map pack and you will usually hear a number. The company at the top of their city has hundreds of reviews and they have forty. The advice that follows is always the same: collect reviews until you catch up. The belief underneath it is that Google sorts the map pack by review count, so the number to beat is whatever the leader has.

We tested that belief on the trade itself. On September 24, 2026 we captured the Google Maps top 20 for “electrician” in 22 US cities, 11 large metros and 11 small cities, and read every listing: 438 results, 434 electrical contractors after screening, 22 searches.

The business sitting at position one has the most reviews in its city in three of the 22 markets. In the other 19, somebody with more reviews is sitting below it.

The number to write down first

The median electrical contractor in the map pack has 42 reviews and a 4.9 rating. The median business in the top three has 139. A top three slot in this trade is not a four figure review count. It is a three figure one, and often a two figure one.

Maps position	Listings	Median reviews	Median rating
1 to 3	66	139	4.9
4 to 7	88	41	4.8
8 to 12	110	28	4.8
13 to 20	170	33	4.9

Notice where the ladder stops being a ladder. The top three stand apart from everyone else. Below them, the medians flatten and then tick back up, which means review count is doing very little to order positions four through twenty.

The floor, not the ceiling

The useful question is not what the leader carries. It is how few reviews the least reviewed business in the top three carries, because that is the entry price in that city. Across the 22 markets, the median floor is 55 reviews. In 11 of the 22 markets, one of the three businesses in the pack has fewer than 50. In nine of them, fewer than 25. The lowest floor in the sample is 10 reviews, in a small city, on a listing with no website at all.

Market size moves that floor more than anything an owner controls:

	Large metros	Small cities
Median listing	100 reviews	12 reviews
Median top three listing	347 reviews	62 reviews
Median floor	171 reviews	18 reviews
Markets with a top three listing under 50 reviews	2 of 11	9 of 11

A benchmark drawn from metros tells a contractor in a small city to chase a number that nobody in their market has. The gap between the two groups is significant on a rank test, at 0.593 across 422 listings.

The benchmark that travels

Absolute review counts do not travel between cities. A ratio does. For every listing we divided its review count by the median review count in its own market, a number any owner can compute from the pack in front of them.

Maps position	Reviews, as a multiple of the market’s median listing
1 to 3	3.3
4 to 7	1.25
8 to 12	0.75
13 to 20	0.61

That multiple is the closest thing to a portable target this study found: 2.97 in large metros, 3.5 in small cities, and 3.36 with the dozen national brand locations taken out. It holds where the absolute numbers are five and ten times apart.

The instruction it hands an operator is concrete. Open the map pack for your service and your city, read the twenty review counts, find the middle one, and multiply it by three. In this sample that is where the top three begins.

Eight businesses that got in without the volume

The multiple is not a gate either. Of the 66 businesses holding a top three slot, eight carry fewer reviews than the median listing in their own market, and none of the eight is a national brand location. Their median review count is 68 against 172 for the rest of the top three, their median rating is 4.9, the same as everyone else up there, and seven of the eight link to a website of their own.

Rating behaves here the way it has in every Maps study we have run. Sixteen of the 66 top three listings hold a flat 5.0, and seven sit below 4.5. Tested against position on independent businesses only, rating has a rank correlation of 0.03, which is no relationship at all. Rating is a floor to clear, not a ladder to climb.

Where review count does sort the list

None of this says reviews are irrelevant. Across the 422 listings with a review count, the rank correlation between position and review volume is negative and significant at 0.264, and it survives on independents alone at 0.252. It is stronger in small cities, at 0.487, than in large metros, at 0.284.

But the effect lives at the bottom. Splitting the sample into review count thirds, the relationship is significant only in the lowest third, the listings holding 1 to 19 reviews, at 0.333. In the middle third and the top third it is not significant. Going from 3 reviews to 30 appears to matter. Above 96, more volume does not visibly move anything here.

The same cities, a different trade

Three days earlier we ran the same method in the same 22 cities for plumbers. The median plumbing listing carries 201 reviews and the median top three plumber carries 796. For electricians those numbers are 42 and 139. Same cities, same week, and an entry price roughly five times apart. A benchmark quoted for local businesses in general, rather than for a trade in a market size, is describing somebody else’s competition.

What changed in verification

Our first run excluded nothing at all from 438 listings, which we do not accept at face value. The categories showed 404 listings filed as Electrician and 24 as electrical installation services, plus four survivors that are not electrical contractors: a supplier whose name ends in Distributors, which our screen missed because it tested the singular word; a heating and air company; a generator dealer; and an electric motor repair shop. Run two excludes those four with their reasons in the dataset. The finding did not move: the median floor was 55 reviews before the correction and after it, because all four sat below position 12.

Two other things belong in the open. Five markets contain two listings sharing one business name at two different addresses, and we counted both, because each address competes for its own position. Twelve listings display no review count at all, which we report as missing rather than as zero; the highest sits at position seven, so no business without a single review reached a top three here.

Limits: what this can and cannot tell you

Every business here already ranks in the top 20 in its city. This study can describe what separates listings inside the map pack. It cannot say what separates them from the contractors who never appear, and the review floor in particular would look different if those businesses were in the data.

We measured position, rating, review count, category, business name and whether the listing links to a website of its own. We did not measure proximity to the center of the search, service area, categories beyond the primary one, photos, posts, review recency, responses to reviews, profile completeness or paid placement. Any of those could carry more of the explanation than review count does.

Results were captured once, on one day, with one query per city and Google’s default location for that city. Maps results move with the searcher’s position, device and time, so a business at position three downtown may not be at position three across town. Ratings and review counts are as Google displayed them at capture time.

Correlation here describes what co-occurs among businesses that already rank. None of it establishes cause, and the honest reading of the tercile result is that our sample cannot detect a review effect above roughly 19 reviews, not that none exists.

The number to write down

If you run an electrical business: the median competitor in your pack has 42 reviews, 100 in a large metro and 12 in a small city. The top three sit at about three times your own market’s median listing, and in half of these cities one of those three has fewer than 50 reviews. The leader’s total is not the entry price, and in 19 of 22 cities it was not even the winning one.

The full dataset, including every listing, the per market floors and the four excluded results with their reasons, is below.