The Google Numbers
Data as of October 2026
4,558 body and dent shops, measured against the shops they actually compete with.
Across 130 markets in 21 states, the median shop is rated 4.8. So is the median shop sitting at number one. Rating is not what separates them.
What was measured
Every shop Google returns for auto body and dent repair in 130 markets, ranked against the other shops in its own market rather than against a national average. A dent shop is never ranked against a collision shop. That is 4,558 shops across 340 cities and 21 states, current as of October 2026.
This is not a survey and nobody was asked anything. It is the public listing data, counted.
Nearly everybody has a good rating
58% of shops are rated 4.8 or better. 1044 of them carry a flat 5.0. Whatever else is true of this trade, the work is rated well and the customers are happy.
Star rating, 4,558 shops.
Which is exactly why it stops telling anybody apart
Split the same shops by where they actually rank, and the ratings barely move. The review counts move by a factor of nearly four.
| Where they rank | Shops | Rating | Reviews |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ranked 1st to 3rd | 390 | 4.8 | 417 |
| Ranked 4th to 10th | 684 | 4.8 | 196 |
| Ranked 11th or lower | 3484 | 4.8 | 72 |
A tenth of a star separates the top three from everybody below them. Nearly 200 reviews separate the top three from the shops ranked eleventh and lower.
Both halves of the trade, separately
A dent shop is never ranked against a collision shop, so these are two studies that happen to agree. Split apart, the dent half is the starker of the two: its median rating is 4.9 at every single rank position.
| Where they rank | Rating | Reviews |
|---|---|---|
| Ranked 1st to 3rd | 4.8 | 405 |
| Ranked 4th to 10th | 4.8 | 206 |
| Ranked 11th or lower | 4.7 | 76 |
| First place in its market | — | 673 |
| Where they rank | Rating | Reviews |
|---|---|---|
| Ranked 1st to 3rd | 4.9 | 433 |
| Ranked 4th to 10th | 4.9 | 182 |
| Ranked 11th or lower | 4.9 | 64 |
| First place in its market | — | 510 |
Being rated best does not mean finishing first
Of the 1044 shops rated a flat 5.0, 983 are not in their market's top three. That is 94% of them.
Compare every pair of shops inside the same market and the point sharpens. 40% of the time, the shop that ranks higher is the shop with the worse rating. Close to four times in ten, the better-rated shop is the one underneath.
Look only at the shop sitting at number one and it holds there too. In 101 of the 130 markets measured, a shop ranked lower carries a better star rating than the shop at the top. Across the whole study 1390 shops, 30% of them, are rated higher than the shop ranked first in their own market. A shop rated a flat 5.0 has a median of 42 reviews. The median first-place shop has 559.
255,139 within-market pairs compared.
What the shop at the top actually has
559
Median review count of a first-place shop, against 93 for the median shop overall. Its median rating is 4.85, the same as everybody else's.
The shop at the top of your market is not better reviewed than you. It is more reviewed than you, by a multiple rather than a margin. That is a volume problem, and a volume problem has a different fix from a quality problem.
Almost all of the distance is spent in one step
Splitting the field into thirds hides where the gap actually opens. Measured position by position, first place is nearly twice second place, and second place is within touching distance of third.
| Position in its market | Median rating | Median reviews |
|---|---|---|
| First | 4.85 | 559 |
| Second | 4.8 | 419 |
| Third | 4.8 | 254 |
| The median shop, any position | 4.8 | 93 |
130 markets, one row per market per position.
How far back the rest of the field sits
623
Median number of reviews a shop is behind the third-placed shop in its own market, counting every shop ranked fourth or lower.
Not behind the leader. Behind third. And the leader carries about 5.4 times the reviews of the median shop in the same market, on a rating within a tenth of a star of it.
What that gap is worth depends entirely on the rate it gets closed at, which is the only variable here anybody controls:
| Reviews collected per month | Time to close 623 |
|---|---|
| 2 a month | 26 years |
| 5 a month | 10 years |
| 10 a month | 5 years |
| 40 a month | 16 months |
4,104 shops measured against their own market's third place. The rates above are arithmetic on 623, not an observed rate at any shop.
Where does your shop sit in your own market?
This page is the whole trade. Your market is the only one that pays you. I build a single-shop version that names your position, the shops above you and the exact gap you would have to close, from the same data. Book the ten minutes and it is built before we speak, so we spend the call on your market rather than on mine.
Book ten minutes, I build yours first
Built by Michael at pdrOS. One shop per market at a time, so ask early.
Method, and what these numbers are not
- Source. Public Google Business Profile listings, scraped October 2026. Rating, review count and position as Google returned them.
- Unit. Every figure is per shop or per market. No figure is averaged across a mailing list, which would count a large metro once for every shop in it.
- Markets, not cities. A market is a ranking group covering a metro, so a shop in a suburb competes with the whole metro rather than with its own town. Groups below three shops are excluded as unrankable.
- Median, not mean. One shop in this set holds 2,906 reviews and would drag every average it touched.
- What this does not show. Rank here is listing position in a market, not a claim about revenue, quality of repair, or what any shop earns. A correlation between reviews and position is not proof that reviews cause position.