It's not like picking a restaurant, and treating it the same way will burn you.
A bad dinner costs you $40 and an evening. A bad mechanic costs you $1,800 and a car that still makes the noise. Same star ratings, wildly different stakes — and the reviews behave differently too.
Three things change once you leave restaurants behind.
There are far fewer reviews. A busy restaurant serves 300 people a day. A good plumber might handle eight jobs. A dentist sees you twice a year. So while 40 reviews would be nothing for a taco shop, for a plumber it can represent years of steady work. Adjust your expectations down — but not all the way down. Under about 15 reviews you still don't have enough to go on.
The reviewers are angrier. People rarely write reviews about a repair that went fine. Why would they? Nothing happened. They write when they got a shocking bill or when the problem came back. This means service businesses carry more 1-star reviews than they probably deserve, and a 4.3 mechanic may be genuinely excellent.
Nobody's an expert. A diner knows whether their food was good. A patient does not know whether they needed that crown. Most service reviews are really rating communication, price, and whether people were nice — not technical competence. That's still useful. It's just not the thing you think you're reading.
For service businesses, treat 4.3 as good and 4.6+ as excellent. Restaurant standards will eliminate every mechanic in your city.
This is the single best trick for service businesses, and almost nobody does it.
Five-star reviews say "great job, fast, friendly." Useless. One-star reviews are often someone furious about a price they agreed to beforehand. Also useless.
The 3-star reviews are where the honest people live. They're the ones saying "the work was solid but it took three days longer than promised" or "they fixed it right, but I had to call twice to get an update." That's the real texture of what working with this business is like.
Ignore the adjectives and hunt for these specifics:
For service businesses this matters more than for restaurants, because you're going to have to talk to these people while something stressful is happening.
Look at how the business answers its worst reviews. Someone who responds with specifics and an offer to fix it is telling you how they'll treat you when something goes wrong. Someone who responds defensively, blames the customer, or argues line by line is telling you that too.
No responses at all is a neutral signal — plenty of great small operators are too busy to manage a review profile.
One specific red flag: a service business with hundreds of reviews and a suspiciously perfect rating.
A dentist seeing 30 patients a day can legitimately accumulate a lot of reviews. But a two-truck plumbing outfit with 800 five-star reviews doesn't add up — there aren't enough hours in the week. When the review count doesn't match the plausible size of the operation, something's been purchased.
Licensing and insurance. No amount of stars substitutes for checking that a contractor, electrician, or plumber is licensed in your state. That's a separate lookup, it's usually free online, and it's the one that protects you if things go badly wrong.
Price level. Reviews skew toward people who were happy to pay or shocked by the bill, with very little in between. Get a written estimate. For anything over a few hundred dollars, get two.
MyTopRate covers mechanics, dentists, plumbers, and electricians alongside restaurants, and the Recommended sort is especially useful here — it stops a brand-new shop with four glowing reviews from outranking the one that's kept a 4.5 across two hundred jobs.