Check the date before you check the stars: how old trade reviews really are

You have found a roofer with 4.9 stars from 87 reviews, and something still feels off. Scroll down and there it is: the newest review is from 2019. The stars say excellent. The dates say that excellence was seven years ago, possibly under different owners, with a different crew, at different prices. Almost everyone checks the rating. Almost nobody checks the calendar.

We wanted to know how much of the review evidence homeowners lean on is actually current, so we looked at the reviews we have captured in full across the sites that publish them: more than two million reviews, 97.4% of which carry the date they were posted. For this piece we focused on the UK: 1,272,034 dated reviews of 113,126 trade businesses, gathered from fourteen platforms, as of July 2026. Here is what came back.

Most of what you read was written years ago

Of those 1.27 million dated UK reviews, more than four in five (83.9%) were posted over a year ago. More than two thirds (69.2%) are over two years old. Nearly four in ten (39.9%) were posted more than five years ago. When you skim a star rating, you are mostly reading history: jobs finished, invoices paid and kitchens fitted years before you picked up your phone.

That is worth pausing on, because a star average treats all of it equally. The five stars a business earned in 2018 count exactly as much as the five stars it earned last month. The average cannot tell you which years it is describing. The dates can.

The industry's own rules say recent reviews matter most

This is not a controversial idea; it is how the review industry itself thinks. Checkatrade's published review guidelines ask customers to describe an experience from within the last twelve months, and its review summaries only appear for businesses with fifty or more reviews from the last two years. Trustpilot puts a visible date on every review it publishes. The people who run review platforms know that a review's usefulness fades with time. The rating you see just does not reflect that.

Set the numbers against a two year window

Put our numbers against the two year window the industry's own rules describe and the conclusion is plain: most of the review evidence behind UK trade profiles sits outside the period generally treated as current. And if anything these figures understate it, because some sites show dates in ways we cannot always read, and we exclude those reviews rather than guess. Even if every review whose date we could not read had been posted yesterday, at least two thirds of UK reviews would still be over two years old.

An old review is not a bad sign. A missing recent one is a question

Before you cross anyone off a list, hold onto this: an old review is real evidence of a real job. The mistake is only reading it as evidence about this year. And a quiet review timeline has plenty of innocent explanations. The best tradespeople are often booked solid through word of mouth and stop needing reviews at all. Some trades are seasonal. Some businesses simply stop asking customers to write anything. And some directories publish only a total count of reviews rather than the reviews themselves, so a business can look quiet on one site while being busy everywhere else.

So the date check is not a way to disqualify people. It is a way to know which question to ask. A glowing profile with nothing recent means one thing: ask what they have been working on lately. Any busy tradesperson will answer that in thirty seconds, usually with photos.

The sixty second date check

1. Open the trader's profile on each site where they have reviews, and sort or scroll to the newest one.
2. Check the date on that newest review. Recent activity is a pass, whatever the size of the archive behind it. A business with four fresh reviews beats a wall of ancient five stars.
3. If the newest review is a couple of years old, do not walk away. Ask the business what they have done recently and whether you can see photos or speak to a recent customer.
4. Check more than one site. Review activity moves between platforms, and a business that looks quiet on one is often active on another.
5. Read the newest handful properly. A recent date plus a specific, detailed story is the strongest review evidence there is.

What good looks like from the other side

For tradespeople, this cuts the friendly way. You do not need hundreds of reviews, and you do not need to have been collecting them since 2009. A steady trickle of dated, recent, specific reviews tells a homeowner more than any historic pile. If your last review is old, the fix is not gaming anything: it is asking your next three happy customers to write a few dated lines about the job. That is the entire trick.

It is also how we build our own pages. On our profiles we show the date on every review where the source publishes one, and a last reviewed signal when we can compute it, so recency is part of the picture rather than a thing you have to dig for. You can read exactly how we gather and cross-check review evidence on our how we check reviews page.