It is a fair question with an unsatisfying honest answer: there is no fixed number of reviews that unlocks success. What matters more than hitting a specific count is having enough recent reviews that your rating feels stable and current.
There is no single magic number
Google does not publish a threshold, and the right number varies by industry, location, and how many reviews competitors nearby have. A single hairdresser in a small town might do well with thirty solid reviews. A plumber competing across a busy city might need closer to a hundred to stand out in a crowded local pack.
Rough thresholds worth knowing
That said, some patterns show up often enough to be useful as rough guides. Below around 25 reviews, a rating is volatile, a single bad review can swing the average noticeably. Past roughly 50 reviews at a solid average, businesses tend to start winning more local search placements against thinner competitors. Past 200, the average stabilises enough that new negative reviews barely move it. These are not hard rules, just useful waypoints.
Why recent reviews count more than old ones
A count is only half the picture. Two hundred reviews collected five years ago tell a searcher far less than fifty reviews collected steadily over the last six months. Recency signals that the experience customers are describing reflects the business as it runs today, not as it ran years ago.
The real target: a habit, not a number
Chasing a specific number tends to produce a short burst of requests followed by months of silence, which does little for either total count or recency. The businesses with consistently strong review profiles are not the ones that hit a target and stopped, they are the ones that built asking into every job as a habit and never really stopped doing it.