In the era of generative AI, customer reviews have become more vital than ever. Search engines, which now prioritize AI in search results, use reviews as data points to determine a business’s credibility, relevance, and local ranking. Your customer review strategy needs to account for answer engines if you want your insurance agency to be included in search summaries and local packs, and in front of potential customers.
In our latest 20 Minute Marketing Webinar, Venus Lanzot, BrightFire’s Manager of Marketing, shared how reviews provide these engines with key information, such as customer sentiment, keywords, and quality signals. She also discussed how BrightFire’s Reviews & Reputation Management service can relieve the burden of managing reviews to help you achieve a positive AI-generated summary.
Replay the webinar, or read through the full transcript for details about how answer engines are using customer reviews. Get actionable tips on what local insurance agencies can do to improve their customer review strategy.
Watch the Webinar
Additional Questions?
If you have any questions about what we discussed in the webinar or our Reviews & Reputation Management service, please schedule a personalized consultation with a BrightFire Sales Advisor.
Webinar Transcript
Read the full transcript, or use the links to jump to a section, and see what’s possible for your agency.
- The Impact Of AI
- A Shift In Search Experience
- How Are Reviews Used?
- It’s About Quantity and Quality
- What Can You Do?
- How BrightFire Helps with Referrals & Reviews
- Online Reviews & Your Overall SEO Strategy
- How to Get Started with BrightFire
- Questions
The Impact Of AI
Today, in the age of AI, online reviews are no longer just simple customer feedback. They’ve become vital data points that influence how your insurance agency appears to potential customers. That’s because Google’s AI Overviews pull directly from Google reviews to determine an overall sentiment that builds their summaries. Other answer engines, such as ChatGPT and Claude, rely on republished Google reviews because they cannot access Google’s review database directly.
Now more than ever, insurance agency owners need to be strategic about collecting genuine, positive customer reviews. Having an abundance of negative reviews, or even a significant lack of reviews, does more than just deter potential customers. It can lead to your business being completely excluded from these prominent AI summaries. As search engines continue to integrate AI into the consumer search journey, being absent from an AI overview can equate to digital invisibility.
It’s important to understand that AI favors content that is both current and authentic. To help ensure your insurance agency is accurately and positively represented by generative AI, you must implement a strategy to maintain a steady flow of positive customer reviews. This isn’t just about protecting your brand. It’s about optimizing your digital presence for the future of search and discovery.
A Shift In Search Experience
The increase in consumers using AI at the start of their search means a significant number of people will no longer visit your website. Instead, they’ll see an AI-generated summary right at the top of their search results. This is essentially your new first impression. If your reviews are all over the place, if some praise your fast service while others complain about delays, the AI gets confused. It can’t synthesize a clear, compelling picture of your business, and the resulting summary will likely be poor.
What the AI answer engine needs is a consistent and detailed set of “ingredients” to work with. Think of every positive, detailed review as a necessary ingredient for a perfect AI-generated answer. The more consistent and descriptive your reviews are about the quality and experience your agency provides, the better the AI can summarize your strengths. That detailed, positive, and consistent summary is what will ultimately lead a user to choose your business over a competitor’s.
How Are Reviews Used?
Overall, online reviews are essential to Google’s ranking algorithms because they help determine three key factors: credibility, relevance, and local rankings.
When customers leave real-world feedback about their experience, these reviews directly influence how Google assesses your business’s trustworthiness. In its Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, Google emphasizes Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). While not direct ranking factors, these concepts reflect the types of signals Google’s algorithm aims to reward when determining search rankings. Within that framework, Trustworthiness is the most critical element, as Google prioritizes sites that offer accurate, reliable, and expert-level information.
This means that because online reviews are public, real-world proof of a customer’s experience, a steady flow of positive reviews acts as a strong signal to AI that your business is trustworthy and reputable. Additionally, the specific keywords used in customer feedback help the answer engine determine the relevance to someone else’s question. Gathering reviews that include specific details can help your agency appear for “long-tail” user queries you might not have explicitly optimized for.
It’s About Quantity and Quality
Let’s look at how the sophistication of your review strategy directly impacts your rankings in the Local Pack.
As I stated earlier, AI prioritizes content that is both current and authentic. High-quality reviews are no longer a passive signal. They’re an active input into search and answer engines’ algorithms. AI engines weigh the content of the review heavily.
For example, a review that simply says “Good service” is far less valuable than one that details, “The service was fast, the staff was friendly, and they offered great value for the price.” These context-rich details—the keywords within the sentiment—are what the ranking algorithm uses to build a robust profile of your business’s strengths, directly influencing how and where your business appears in local search results.
This brings us to an important point. Both quantity and quality matter. A large number of reviews gives the ranking algorithm more data, but a high star rating combined with detailed commentary is the optimal combination. The ranking algorithm also considers relevance and recency. New, positive reviews act as powerful signals of an active, thriving business. When potential customers see fresh, detailed feedback, they trust it more, and the algorithm uses this information to determine relevance to queries.
A successful review strategy focuses not just on capturing 5-stars, but on generating a steady stream of descriptive, high-quality endorsements that continuously validate your insurance agency’s value.
What Can You Do?
So, what can you do to harness the power of online reviews?
First, you need to be proactive. Don’t wait for customers to stumble upon your review page. Instead, integrate it into your service workflow. Immediately after a successful service interaction, send a simple, direct link via email or text asking for a review. The moment of satisfaction is when they’re most likely to give you a positive rating, so strike while the iron is hot. Some examples include resolving a claim, finding the customer savings, or saving them time.
Second, engagement and visibility are key. Every review—good, bad, or neutral—is an opportunity to communicate. Respond to every single review promptly and professionally. This shows potential customers that you are an engaged, authoritative business that values feedback.
Finally, think strategically about the language customers use. We know AI is summarizing these reviews, so instead of just asking for a review, prompt your customer to leave specific feedback. As an example, “We’re so glad we were able to find you some savings! Would you mind taking a minute to share on Google how we were able to save you money?”
This prompt can help ensure your customers use positive keywords most relevant to your business, such as “fast claims,” “great service,” or “local expert.” These keywords will organically increase your relevance and prominence in those AI-generated summaries, essentially turning customer language into a powerful SEO tool.
How BrightFire Helps with Referrals & Reviews
With all that said, when it comes to boosting your referral marketing and protecting your online reputation, BrightFire is here to help with our Reviews & Reputation Management service. We aim to take the burden off of you so your agency can generate new reviews with ease, improve your SEO rankings, and gauge customer satisfaction.
With our Reviews & Reputation Management service, we provide everything you need to successfully manage your online reputation, including:
- The creation and management of review profiles.
- Professional agency branding.
- Two BrightFire-managed review generation campaigns each year.
- Two BrightFire-managed Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys each year.
- Two BrightFire-managed referral generation campaigns each year.
- Unlimited individual and broadcast review requests via text message and email.
- Ongoing review monitoring and management.
- Option to automatically share new positive reviews to Facebook & Instagram.
- And, automated referrals to generate more high-quality leads.
Online Reviews & Your Overall SEO Strategy
While online reviews can help improve your website’s SEO and strengthen your agency’s rankings in the search results, they are not the only ingredient. That’s why BrightFire offers an Ultimate SEO Bundle. This bundle of three foundational services, including an Insurance Agency Website, Reviews & Reputation Management, and Local Listings Management, helps agencies provide more of the signals that search and answer engines use to determine their recommendations.
With our Ultimate SEO Bundle, you’ll receive an amazing custom-designed agency website that’s optimized for AI so you can attract and convert more insurance buyers online, all of the benefits of Reviews & Reputation Management, and Local Listings Management, which is designed to manage more than 50 of the most important online listings for your agency.
The best part is that when you sign up for the Ultimate SEO Bundle, you’ll save on the standalone prices of each of those three services.
How to Get Started with BrightFire
To get started with BrightFire, simply schedule a one-to-one, no-obligation consultation with a BrightFire Sales Advisor at brightfire.com/contact-sales.
Our digital marketing services do not have any setup fees, contracts, or user fees, and we also include a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Thank You & Questions
That concludes our presentation on How Customer Reviews Impact Your Business in the Age of AI. Now we’ll head into our Q&A session!
As a reminder to our attendees, please use the Q&A feature to submit your question. We’ll do our best to answer any questions that come through. If we aren’t able to address your question during the webinar, someone from BrightFire will follow up with you.
The first question is, How does BrightFire’s optional automated customizable review responses service work? Does it handle the initial response, and how do I ensure the response sounds personal and professional, not automated?
You can create as many custom response templates as you like. Response templates are categorized by a combination of star rating and whether or not the review included text. For example, you could have 10 response templates for 5-star reviews that include text. Response templates can use personalization tokens, such as the reviewer’s name. Each time you get a review, the system will look at the response templates available and cycle through them. Enabling response templates isn’t an all-or-nothing decision. For example, you can enable response templates for 5-star reviews that don’t include any text and manually respond to all other reviews. The choice is yours.
Our next question is, The presentation emphasizes the importance of generating fresh, authentic content and recent reviews. How frequently should I be generating new reviews to satisfy the AI algorithms and maintain a strong Local Pack ranking?
To satisfy AI algorithms and maintain a strong Local Pack ranking, insurance agencies should aim for a consistent and continuous flow of new, positive reviews, ideally generating two to five per month. Instead of thinking in terms of “I need to get 50 reviews,” think, “I need to get one review every week.” Over time, you can increase the frequency as you get more accustomed to the process.
Well, I think that is all the time we have for questions today. Thank you to everyone who submitted a question. Have a great day.