The short answer
A reputation report is a short, recurring summary of what customers said about your business online and what you did about it. For a local business, a useful monthly report covers new reviews and rating movement, replies sent and how quickly, the top praise and complaint themes, notable individual reviews, and two or three actions for next month, broken out per location and kept to a single page.
- One page, same layout every month. Owners compare reports, so consistency beats decoration.
- Lead with change since last month, not all-time totals that barely move.
- Report each location separately, then add one line for the brand as a whole.
- Every report should end with named actions and an owner for each, or it is just a scoreboard.
What a reputation report is actually for
Most review reports we have seen fail in the same way: twelve charts, a word cloud, a list of every review received, and no conclusion. The owner flips through it, sees the average is still 4.6, and closes the file. Nothing changes, and three months later nobody opens it at all.
A report earns its place when it answers three questions for the person paying for the business: Is our reputation getting better or worse? Why? What are we doing about it? Everything that does not help answer one of those can go in an appendix or be dropped.
This is different from the deeper, occasional work of reputation analysis, where you dig through a quarter or a year of reviews to find root causes. The monthly report is the regular check-in that keeps everyone honest between those deep dives.
A monthly reputation report template
Copy this structure into a doc or spreadsheet. Each block should take a few lines, not a page.
| Block | What goes in it | Example line |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Headline | One sentence on the month | "Steady month: rating flat, replies faster, parking complaints up." |
| 2. Review intake | New reviews this month vs last month, split by star rating | "27 new reviews (last month 31): 21 five-star, 3 four-star, 1 three-star, 2 one-star." |
| 3. Rating movement | Average rating of this month's reviews vs the prior three months | "This month averaged 4.5 vs 4.7 over the prior quarter." |
| 4. Responsiveness | Share of reviews replied to and typical time to reply | "26 of 27 answered; most within one business day." |
| 5. What people praised | The top two or three positive themes, with one short quote | "Staff by name (Sam, Priya), quick turnaround." |
| 6. What people complained about | The top one or two negative themes, with counts | "Parking mentioned in 4 reviews, all negative." |
| 7. Reviews to know about | Any review that needs owner attention: legal tone, safety, a named employee | "One 1-star alleging a billing error; refund issued, reply posted." |
| 8. Actions | Two or three specific changes, each with an owner and a date | "Add parking directions to booking confirmation (Alex, by the 15th)." |
Notice what is missing: the all-time review count and the lifetime average. Both are worth one line in the brand summary, but they move so slowly that putting them first teaches readers to ignore the report. Month-on-month change is where the story is.
Quoting real customer words in blocks 5 and 6 does more than any chart. A manager who reads "waited 25 minutes past my appointment time" three times in one report does not need a graph to understand the problem. Keep quotes short and leave out reviewer names when the report goes beyond the leadership team.
Reporting per location without drowning in pages
If you run more than one site, a single combined report hides the location that is quietly sliding. A strong downtown branch can carry a struggling suburban one for months before the brand average shows it. Report each location on its own, then summarize.
- Same template for every site. Readers should find the complaints block in the same spot on every page.
- A comparison strip on top. One small table listing each location's new reviews, month average and reply rate makes the outlier obvious at a glance.
- Rank by change, not by score. The branch that dropped the most this month deserves the first conversation, even if its average is still the highest.
- Small locations get context. A site with four reviews this month can swing wildly; note the count beside the average so nobody panics over one bad week.
For brands with ten or more sites, the per-location pages usually go to area managers while the owner reads only the strip and the actions. Our page on multi-location reputation management covers how to set up that accountability.
How to build the report each month
Fix the reporting window
Use calendar months and always compare against the same prior period. Switching between 30-day rolling windows and calendar months makes trends look like they moved when they did not.
Pull the month's reviews
Gather every Google review received in the window for each location, with star rating, date, text and whether it has a reply. If you work from Google directly this is copy-and-paste; a tool that syncs your Business Profile saves the step.
Count and compare
Fill in blocks 2 to 4 of the template: intake by star rating, the month's average against the prior quarter, and reply coverage.
Read, then tag themes
Read every review once, all the way through. Tag what each one is about and count the tags. This is the slow part and the most valuable one.
Pick the reviews worth escalating
Flag anything mentioning safety, discrimination, legal action, refunds or a named staff member. These go in block 7 whether or not they were already handled.
Write the actions last
Only after the numbers and themes are in front of you, agree two or three changes with the location manager and put a name and date beside each.
Presenting the report to owners and managers
How you deliver the report matters nearly as much as what is in it. A few things we have learned from walking owners through review numbers:
Do
- Open with the headline sentence and the actions, then show the evidence.
- Bring two or three verbatim reviews; they land harder than percentages.
- Credit staff named in positive reviews, in front of their manager.
- Say plainly when a month was quiet. A short report is fine.
Don't
- Lead with a vanity number like total reviews ever received.
- Read out every review in the meeting.
- Blame individual staff from a single complaint without checking what happened.
- Change the layout every month so nobody can compare.
If a location manager disputes a complaint theme, go back to the review text together. Usually the disagreement dissolves when both of you read the same five reviews. Occasionally it surfaces a review that looks fake; our guide to responding to fake reviews covers what to do then.
Why replies belong in every reputation report
Ratings are mostly in your customers' hands. Replies are entirely in yours. Including reply coverage and speed in the report gives managers a number they can move this week, and it keeps the low-rated reviews from sitting unanswered while everyone waits for the next meeting.
It is also worth quoting one reply you were proud of. A thoughtful answer to a 2-star review shows the team what good looks like far better than a style guide. Our 2-star review responses page has examples if you want a reference point.
If reply coverage keeps slipping because nobody has time, that is a staffing or tooling decision for the owner, and the report is where it should surface.
Where Responsly fits (and where it does not)
Responsly does not generate or email PDF reports. What it gives you is the data most of the template needs, already gathered, in its Insights view:
- Rating trend, sentiment and reply rate for each location, with every location side by side.
- The themes customers mention most, which fills blocks 5 and 6 without hand-tagging.
- A single inbox of Google reviews across locations, filterable by location, so pulling notable reviews takes minutes.
- AI-drafted replies so reply coverage stops being the block that is always red.
Teams usually keep the written report itself in a doc or slide they already use, and take the numbers from Insights. Responsly covers Google reviews only, so if your report also needs other review sites or social media, those figures will have to come from elsewhere. Plans are priced per location; see pricing for details.