Somebody Else Is Writing Your Business Description

Search for a local business now and the description you get is increasingly being assembled from things customers have said about it.

That matters because customers do not review businesses the way businesses describe themselves.

A plumber in Auckland might describe the company as doing maintenance, renovations, hot water cylinders, emergency callouts and new builds. But if most of the written reviews are from people who called after a leak, an AI assistant looking at those reviews may come away thinking emergency plumbing is what the business mainly does.

The business has not changed. The description of it has.

A five-star rating does not tell an assistant very much beyond the fact that somebody was happy. A review saying "replaced our hot water cylinder in Papakura on a Saturday, quoted before starting, no mess left" contains far more.

There is a job, a location, a time constraint, something about pricing and something about how the property was treated.

That information can be used.

Local search specialist Darren Shaw gives a useful example. Someone looking for a plumber might add that they have just had new floors laid. A business with reviews repeatedly mentioning tidy work suddenly has evidence that is relevant to that particular question.

Another plumber may be every bit as careful. If nobody has ever written that down, there is less for a search engine or AI system to work with.

We run into this constantly

Top5.nz currently publishes around 4,400 business descriptions across its ranking pages. Those descriptions are generated from each business's customer reviews, using up to 25 reviews where they are available.

The difference between businesses is noticeable.

Some have years of detailed reviews covering different jobs, suburbs and situations. There is plenty to work with.

Others may have a good rating and a decent number of reviews, but very little written detail. Sometimes fewer than ten reviews contain enough text to say much about the business at all.

We saw this during beta testing. A few business owners told us their descriptions made them sound narrower than they really were.

In several cases, they were right.

But when we went back through the reviews, the missing services were barely mentioned there either. We could not reasonably write them into the description just because the business told us they offered them.

The review request matters

Most businesses ask customers to "leave us a review".

That tends to produce reviews like:

"Great service, highly recommend."

Useful as a rating. Not much use as a description.

There is nothing wrong with asking someone to describe their experience in their own words. Google's policy does, however, draw a line around trying to influence what a customer says or what rating they give.

So don't hand customers a checklist of things you would like mentioned.

The more useful change is simply to ask consistently across the work you actually do.

If almost every person you ask is an emergency-callout customer, emergency work will dominate your reviews. If you also do renovations, installations and maintenance, reviews from those customers matter too.

Timing makes a difference for the same reason. Twenty reviews collected during one busy period give a different picture from reviews accumulated across several seasons and different types of work.

Have a look at what yours say

An easy test is to ask an AI assistant what your business is known for.

Then ask what services it appears to offer.

The interesting part is often not what it gets wrong. It is what never gets mentioned.

You may know that a particular service represents a quarter of your work, but find almost no trace of it in your reviews. Or customers may repeatedly mention something you barely talk about on your own website.

That gap is worth knowing about.

Top5.nz does the same exercise at scale. The descriptions on our ranking pages are based on what customers have actually said about each business. Owners can claim their listing free, and subscribers can tell us which review-supported parts of their work they would prefer us to lead with. That changes the description, not the ranking.

The full guide looks more closely at what happens when the reviews a business has collected do not match the business it has become.