In August 2026 we read every reply written by 328 London cafés to their Google reviews — 2,907 of them. Not a sample, not a survey. The replies themselves, as published.
We were looking for something specific: how much of this writing is actually written, and how much is assembled.
156 sentences appear at more than one business
We took every sentence of five words or more and asked how many different cafés had published it. 156 sentences appear, word for word, at two or more separate businesses.
Counted across 2,907 replies from 328 London cafés, August 2026. Sentences of five words or more; where a shorter sentence was contained inside a longer one, only the longer was counted, so nothing is double-reported.
These are not similar sentences. They are the same sentence, at businesses that have nothing to do with each other, in different postcodes, under different owners.
More than a third of replies to unhappy customers do not mention what happened
We took the 395 replies written to reviews of three stars or fewer and measured how much of each reply engages the specific content of the review it sits under — the dish, the wait, the person, the price. Thirty-seven per cent score zero: they touch nothing the reviewer actually said. They answer the star rating, not the review.
“Thanks for your brilliant rating – it means a lot to our team.”
That reply is not rude and not wrong. It simply could have been posted under any review, at any business, on any day. A customer who wrote three careful paragraphs can tell.
Real replies are much shorter than people think
The median London café reply is 31 words. Eighty-three per cent are under 60. More than half are a single paragraph. Replies to unhappy customers run longer — a median of 54 words — but ninety per cent still come in under 117.
This matters if you are considering a tool that writes replies for you. Most of them produce three paragraphs and a hundred and fifty words. That length is itself a signal: it is not what an owner sounds like.
And they say Hi, not Dear
Twenty-nine per cent of replies open with Hi. Thirteen per cent open with Dear. A third skip the greeting and go straight to thanks. Nearly half use the reviewer's name; the rest do not, and nobody minds.
What we take from this
Fifty-seven per cent of the cafés we measured had replied to none of their recent reviews. That is the headline number, and it is the one everybody quotes. But the more useful finding is what happens when a café does reply.
A reply that could sit under any review, at any business, is the work of none of them. Answering is not the hard part. Sounding like yourself is.
How this was measured
328 cafés across 24 London neighbourhoods, read from their live Google listings in August 2026. Every figure here is a count on that data, not an estimate. We name no individual business: the point is the pattern, not the pillory.