62.4% of the Companies That Dominate US Google Results Rate Below 3 Stars on Trustpilot

A shopper is about to sign up for a new bank account, switch phone plans or book a cross-country move. Before entering her details she searches the company's name plus "reviews" and lands on its Trustpilot page. The score at the top is below 2 out of 5, and the first review on the page is a long, angry account of a refund that never came, with no answer from the company underneath.

Trustpilot is one of the review sites people land on when they search a company's name, and its TrustScore, a rating out of 5 based on customer reviews, is the first thing they see there. For a well-known brand, that number is part of its reputation whether it manages it or not, and it is what journalists, shoppers and would-be partners see when they check up on a company.

62.4% of the companies whose websites show up most in US Google search results rate below 3 stars on Trustpilot, and four in ten rate below 2. Industry matters: delivery apps average 1.33 stars and mobile carriers 1.57, while travel booking sites lead at 2.6. So does review volume. Companies with 10,000 or more reviews average 3.81 stars, and the moving companies that reply to every review score above 4 while their silent competitors score 2 or lower.

On September 23, 2026 we took the 1,300 websites that appear most often in US Google search results across 27,000 common searches and looked each one up on Trustpilot. 869 had a company profile with a TrustScore; the other 431 had no profile or no score and are not part of the figures. For each company we recorded the TrustScore and the total number of reviews, and analysed up to 100 of its most recent public reviews, 61,188 reviews in total, for star rating, length, date and whether the company posted a public reply.

We then grouped the companies into seven industries: delivery apps, mobile carriers, insurers, banks, online retailers, moving companies and travel booking sites. For four of them we looked closer: the 3 big US food and grocery delivery apps (300 recent reviews), the 3 big US mobile carriers (218 recent reviews), 6 travel booking and travel search sites (600 recent reviews), and the 5 big moving companies with an established Trustpilot review history. A TrustScore runs from 1 to 5 stars. The 1-star share is the percentage of recent reviews that gave 1 star, the reply rate is the percentage of recent reviews with a public reply from the company, and the median is the middle value: half are higher, half lower.

Scores cluster at the bottom. 39.6% of these companies score below 2 stars, and 170 score between 1.0 and 1.4, the lowest band on the scale. At the other end, 20% score 4 or higher and 91 companies score 4.5 or above. The average TrustScore is 2.63 and the median 2.3.

These are mostly large, well-known brands: banks, insurers, online retailers, software companies, travel sites and service marketplaces. Many sell something customers only think about when it goes wrong, such as a denied claim, a frozen account or a late delivery, and that is when they go looking for a review site.

Trustpilot scores differ sharply by industry. The big US delivery apps average 1.33 stars and the big US mobile carriers 1.57, and every company in both groups scores below 3. Insurers, banks and online retailers sit in a middle band between 2.19 and 2.42, with roughly seven in ten companies below 3. Travel booking sites lead at 2.6, and they are the only group where half the companies score 3 or above.

The pattern lines up with how often a customer can be let down. Delivery and mobile service are used constantly, and each order or bill is a fresh chance for something to fail. A trip, by contrast, is something people enjoy, and one that goes to plan often prompts a quick positive review.

Of 300 recent reviews of the three big delivery apps, only one gives 5 stars. All three apps score below 2, between 1.1 and 1.7, on 12,279 to 16,741 reviews each, so the scores rest on tens of thousands of customer experiences. The complaints also arrive fast: the busiest app collected its last 100 reviews in 9 days, and the slowest in 50. A shopper checking the page sees an almost unbroken run of fresh 1-star stories.

The mobile carriers look much the same. 90.8% of their 218 recent reviews give 1 star, and the median review runs 73 to 112 words depending on the carrier, against 72 to 83 words for the delivery apps. Reviews that long describe a problem in detail: a doubled bill, a failed number transfer, an order that never arrived.

Neither group answers. None of the three delivery apps and none of the three carriers posted a public reply to their recent Trustpilot reviews. On a page where nearly every visitor arrives with a complaint, a reply is the only place the brand's own voice appears, and in both industries that place is empty.

The six big travel booking and travel search sites average 2.6 stars, the best of the seven industries, and 3 of the 6 score 3 or above, with the top-rated site at 4.0. Their recent reviews are far less one-sided: 45.5% are 1-star, half the share seen at delivery apps and carriers.

Two habits separate travel sites from the bottom of the table. They collect short, positive reviews: at the best-rated travel site, 65% of recent reviews are 5-star and the median review runs 10 words, the kind a satisfied customer leaves in a few seconds. And they reply. Travel sites answer 22% of their recent reviews overall, the most active one 56%, while delivery apps and carriers answer none.

Moving companies average 2.51 stars as an industry, but the biggest names do not sit near that average. Of the 5 big US moving companies with an established Trustpilot review history, three score 2 stars or lower, at 2.0, 2.0 and 1.4, and two score far higher: HireAHelper at 4.6 on 15,492 reviews and PODS at 4.1 on 13,978 reviews. No big mover scores between 2.0 and 4.1.

The two top-rated movers reply to every recent review and collect about 14 new ones a day: each gathered 100 reviews in 7 days. 84% of HireAHelper's recent reviews and 72% of PODS's are 5-star, and their median review runs 19 and 28 words, a quick thank-you. The three lower-rated movers took between 99 and 1,285 days to gather their latest reviews, between 70% and 87% of them are 1-star, and the median review runs 100 to 117 words, a full account of what went wrong. Within one industry, the movers that collect reviews quickly and answer them score more than twice as high as the ones that do neither.

Scores rise with review volume. Companies with 10,000 or more Trustpilot reviews average 3.81 stars, and 16.5% of them rate below 3. Companies with 100 to 999 reviews average 2.2 and 77.4% rate below 3, nearly five times the share.

The companies with the most reviews tend to be the ones that ask for them. When a company sends every customer an invitation to review after a purchase, most of those reviews come from people whose order went fine, and they outnumber the complaints. Among the largest profiles, Wise scores 4.3 stars on 301,293 reviews, and JustAnswer and Remitly both score 4.6.

56.6% of recent Trustpilot reviews of leading companies are 1-star and 33.7% are 5-star. Two, three and four stars together make up under 10%. Customers come to Trustpilot either to complain or to praise, and very few leave a middling review.

Unhappy reviewers also write more. The median 1-star review runs 77 words, against 21 words for a 5-star review, nearly four times as long. A shopper who opens a company's review page reads detailed complaints next to short praise, which makes the complaints feel heavier than the score alone suggests.

A low TrustScore is common for a big consumer brand, but the industries and companies at the top of these tables show it is not fixed. The same pattern shows up in each comparison: companies with 10,000 or more reviews, travel sites that collect short 5-star reviews and movers that reply to every review all score well above their peers, and each pairs its high score with a steady flow of reviews from ordinary customers.

Set up an automatic review invitation after every purchase, delivery, trip or completed service, so satisfied customers are asked as often as unhappy ones speak up. Then reply to reviews, starting with the 1-star ones. In the two lowest-scoring industries no company replies at all, so a brand that answers publicly, with a named support route and a next step, stands out on the page at once.

Track your score, 1-star share and review volume month by month against your direct competitors, not against brands in other industries, since industry averages alone range from 1.33 to 2.6 stars. Our reputation management services build that review program and response workflow for brands that want their Trustpilot page to reflect their real customers.

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