In August 2026 we read every reply written by 328 London cafés to their Google reviews — 14,130 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.
664 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. 664 sentences appear, word for word, at two or more separate businesses.
Counted across the 2,907 replies from 328 London cafés read for this piece in August 2026 — the first count, before the corpus was widened. 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.
Since this was written
This piece was written from the London count. We have since read the same thing in 18 cities: 14,130 replies from 914 cafés across 90 neighbourhoods. The London figures above are left as they were measured — the answer rate in particular cannot be recomputed, because outside London we only read reviews that already carried a reply.
What the wider count changed, and what it did not: the shape of the problem held. Across all 18 cities, 51 per cent of replies still share no distinctive word with the review above them, and 8 per cent still break at least one check. What grew was the repetition figure — 664 sentences now appear at two or more separate businesses, with the most repeated closing line turning up at 68 cafés spread across every city we read.
In other words: London was not unusual. It was representative.
The full top ten
Since first publishing this we have read the same thing in six cities. These are the ten most repeated sentences and the number of separate businesses publishing each:
- "hope to see you again soon!" — 68 cafés
- "we hope to see you again soon!" — 54 cafés
- "thank you for your feedback." — 52 cafés
- "thank you so much for your lovely review!" — 47 cafés
- "thank you for your review." — 46 cafés
- "we hope to see you again soon." — 36 cafés
- "hope to see you again soon." — 34 cafés
- "thank you for taking the time to share your feedback." — 34 cafés
- "thank you so much for your wonderful review!" — 27 cafés
- "thank you for your lovely review!" — 27 cafés
122 sentences appear at five or more separate businesses. The distribution has a long tail: most repeated sentences are shared by two or three cafés, and a small handful are shared by dozens.
Why the most repeated sentence is the most natural one
There is nothing wrong with hoping to see someone again. It is the obvious thing to write, which is exactly why so many people write it. The sentence is not a failure of imagination on any one owner's part — it is the statistical consequence of thousands of people independently reaching for the same reasonable phrase.
Which means it cannot be fixed by trying harder. It is fixed by having something else to say, and that comes from the review itself.
What a listing looks like from outside
Open three café listings in the same neighbourhood and scroll the replies. This is the experience the repetition figure describes: the same closing line, three times, from three businesses that have never met.
Nobody is being deceived and no rule is being broken. The effect is subtler and worse — the reader stops reading the replies, because they have learned that the replies contain no information.
That is the real cost of a shared sentence. Not a penalty, not a complaint. The quiet retirement of the one part of your listing where you were allowed to speak.
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.