What we measured
We read London cafés' Google reviews for a living, so we count things while we are in there. Everything below is a count on real listings — no surveys, no estimates, and no individual business named.
Why we put review replies on autopilot
Writing one good reply is easy. Remembering to write a good one every time, for years, is the part that beats a café. So we took it off your plate entirely.
Read it →Nearly half of café review replies do not mention the review
We measured 6,768 replies that share not one distinctive word with the review above them. That is 51 per cent of everything we read.
Read it →Two in three replies to angry reviews break a rule the business would not break out loud
Of 1421 replies to one- and two-star reviews, 703 concede fault, promise compensation, guarantee the future or push the customer off the page.
Read it →85 per cent of foreign-language reviews get an English reply
922 reviews in our corpus were not written in English. 788 of them were answered in English anyway — usually with a sentence the reviewer will never read.
Read it →Which UK city writes the best café review replies?
We read 14,130 replies in 18 cities and ran the same checks on all of them. The gap between best and worst is wider than the gap between good and bad cafés in either.
Read it →The London cafés that answer every review
Fifty-seven per cent of London cafés reply to nothing. These ones reply to everything — and we went back and counted properly to be sure.
Read it →The London Café Review Report, 2026
We read every Google review reply published by 328 London cafés across 24 neighbourhoods — 14,130 of them — and counted what is in them. Free to cite.
Read it →Only one reply in eight says something and stands its ground.
We measured every reply London cafés wrote to an unhappy customer. Most either ignore what was said, or apologise for it. Very few do the third thing.
Read it →We read 14,130 replies from UK cafés. One sentence appears at 68 of them.
What happens when you count the actual words London cafés use to answer their reviews — not the advice about answering, the answers themselves.
Read it →The same measurement, run on your café instead of the 914. Free, about twenty seconds, and your first ten replies are free — no card to start.
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