38% of customers won't buy a product with reviews older than three months
Reviews have an expiration date. E-commerce stores focus on how many reviews they have on a product page, but few consider how old they are. Yet customers check the date before they even start reading, and three independent studies agreed on the exact same threshold: three months.
A product page no one updated for a year
Forty reviews, 4.6 stars, the latest one from last November. A customer doesn't see this as a 'well-rated product', but as a product that nobody buys anymore.
According to Bazaarvoice (2021, 5,000+ respondents across five countries), 47% of people interpret the lack of fresh reviews this exact way.
Three months. Three studies agreed on it
PowerReviews 2022 (9,012 respondents): 77% want reviews that are at most three months old.
Bazaarvoice 2021: only 47% consider three-month-old reviews relevant, dropping to 25% after a year.
BrightLocal 2026 (1,002 respondents): 74% look for reviews from the last three months.
The impact on sales
Won't buy a product with reviews older than 90 days
PowerReviews, 2022
Won't buy a product with reviews older than a year
PowerReviews, 2022
Consider review recency just as important as count
PowerReviews, 2022
Interprets lack of new reviews as a sign that no one is buying the product
Bazaarvoice, 2021
PowerReviews measured the impact on sales: 38% of customers won't buy a product if its reviews are older than 90 days. For one-year-old reviews, that figure jumps to 62%.
And 81% of people consider review recency just as important as, or more important than, review count.
What to do about it right now
Three steps you can take without a budget or an external agency.
Share of customers for whom reviews older than three months are a problem
- 1Open your top ten bestselling products and check the date of the latest review. Not the countâthe date. How many of them have a review younger than three months? That's your baseline, done in ten minutes for free.
- 2Check the date with partners as well. On Heureka and retail channels, reviews age just the sameâpeople just tend to forget to monitor them there.
- 3Collect ahead of peak season. November reviews need to be live on the product page by the end of October.
Why a single wave won't solve it
A one-off campaign will keep a product page fresh for about a quarter. After that, you're right back where you started.
Eight campaigns in the Czech market
It's eight campaign observations, not an academic study, but it aligns perfectly with research findings.
Recommendation
Review generation is a process, not a one-off project. That's why at Testuj.to we don't collect reviews in isolated bursts, but spread them out over time so they accumulate continuously and don't all age at once.
Sources: PowerReviews, The Power of Review Volume & Recency (2022) · Bazaarvoice, Review recency (2021) · BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey (2026) · Heureka Group, tracking of eight Testuj.to campaigns (2024â2026).
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