Half of all pressure washing companies have 9 reviews or fewer
What we found in 27,078 Google listings, why a 5.0 star rating is worth almost nothing in this trade, and the one number that separates the map pack.
We finished the latest pass of the benchmark dataset this week: 27,078 pressure washing listings pulled from public Google Business Profiles across 51 states. One number reframes the whole trade.
The median pressure washing company has 9 reviews.
Not 50. Not 100. Half of every company in this business, in every state, is sitting at 9 or below. 17.8% have never collected a single one, and 51.3% are still in single digits.
Why that number is so low here
Two structural things make pressure washing different from plumbing or HVAC.
The first is entry. A trailer, a machine and a truck put someone in business in a weekend, and a new wave enters every spring. That shows up in the ratings data as well: 14.6% of listings have no rating at all, which is what a business three weeks old looks like.
The second is the moment of the job. A plumber leaves after fixing something invisible in a wall. You leave after producing a transformation the homeowner is standing in the middle of, staring at. It is the single best review moment in the trades, and almost nobody in this industry asks for it.
The 5.0 star trap
Here is the number that surprises most owners. 79.8% of rated pressure washing companies show a perfect 5.0, and 94.9% are at 4.5 or higher. The average rating across the whole dataset is 4.9 stars.
A 5.0 in this trade is not an achievement. It is the default state of a company with nine reviews, most of them from people who know the owner. Only 2.6% of companies sit below 4.0.
So when an owner tells us he is protecting his perfect rating by not asking widely, he has it backwards. He is protecting a signal that carries no information, at the cost of the signal that carries all of it. A company at 4.8 stars with 140 reviews beats a 5.0 with 11 on the click, on the phone call, and on how often Google shows it at all.
The number that actually matters
If the median is 9, the target is not the median. Google's map pack shows three businesses. In any metro with real volume those three are far up the curve.
The 75th percentile in our data is 36 reviews. The 90th is 103. Only 10.4% of pressure washing companies have crossed 100.
Which means the map pack in most suburbs is being held by companies with somewhere between 60 and 150 reviews. That is a reachable number. At 15 jobs a week and one ask at every single one, converting at roughly one in three, you are adding five a week. From a standing start that clears 36 in about three months and 103 inside six.
There is no budget in that sentence. There is a sentence said in a driveway, fifteen times a week.
The other gap in the same dataset
While we were in the numbers, one more split is worth reporting. 31.7% of pressure washing companies link no website from their Google profile at all.
Companies that do link one carry a median of 17 reviews. Companies that do not carry 2.
We are not claiming a website generates reviews. Both are downstream of the same thing, which is whether the owner is running a business or running a trailer. But it makes competitor research trivially easy. Pull up the three listings that show for "driveway cleaning" in your town. If one of them has no website and four reviews, that spot is not defended. It is just currently occupied.
What we would do with this if it were our company
- Look at your own listing and write down four things: review count, rating, website linked or not, hours set or not.
- Place yourself. Under 9 is the bottom half of the entire country. 103 and up is map-pack territory.
- Start asking at the truck, at the last job of the day, before you pull away, with the link sent from the driveway. The full script is in the reviews guide.
- Ask them to name the surface and the town in the review. That text is what Google and the AI answer engines actually read.
- If you are in the 31.7% without a site, that is a week of work and the widest open gap in the trade. The website guide lists the seven things it has to do.
The full report, with review distributions, ratings, website types, hours and the state-by-state counts, is at the benchmarks page. It refreshes monthly.
If you want the review system built and run for you, it is one of the services in the free 14-day trial. Text or call (385) 832-6175.