Pet groomers on Google: the 2026 benchmark report
Review counts, ratings, websites and hours for 20,247 pet grooming businesses, computed from public Google Business Profile listings across 51 states.
Reviews
| Review count | Value |
|---|---|
| Median | 38 |
| Average (mean) | 73.9 |
| 25th percentile | 11 |
| 75th percentile | 92 |
| 90th percentile | 175 |
Share of pet groomers by review count:
| Bucket | Share of listings |
|---|---|
| 0 reviews | 5.6% |
| Under 10 | 22.7% |
| Under 25 | 40% |
| 100 or more | 22.8% |
| 500 or more | 1.2% |
Ratings
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Average rating | 4.64 |
| Rated 5.0 | 26% |
| Rated 4.5 or higher | 78.9% |
| Rated under 4.0 | 5.5% |
| No rating yet | 3.6% |
Websites
| Website status | Share |
|---|---|
| Website listed | 73.7% |
| No website listed | 26.3% |
| Own domain | 64.4% |
| Social profile only | 8.1% |
| Free or DIY builder | 1.2% |
Median review count for pet groomers with a website: 47. Without one: 20.
Profile completeness and hours
| Profile field | Share |
|---|---|
| Has a profile photo | 98% |
| Public email on profile | 21% |
| Open 24 hours | 0.8% |
| Open Saturday | 50.4% |
| Open Sunday | 18.3% |
| No hours listed | 34.2% |
Where the listings are
| State | Listings |
|---|---|
| CA | 1,577 |
| FL | 1,312 |
| OH | 693 |
| TX | 596 |
| NC | 594 |
| MI | 585 |
| PA | 564 |
| NJ | 548 |
| NY | 538 |
| IL | 537 |
| AZ | 472 |
| GA | 451 |
Primary categories
| Google category | Listings |
|---|---|
| Pet groomer | 20,164 |
| (blank) | 14 |
| Dog day care center | 13 |
| Pet boarding service | 10 |
| Pet care service | 6 |
| Pet sitter | 4 |
| Pet store | 4 |
| Dog trainer | 4 |
Read the median first, then ignore it
Half of all grooming businesses on Google have 38 reviews or fewer. If your shop is at 60 you are already in the better half of the country. That is comforting for about ten seconds, because you do not compete with the country. You compete with the two or three listings Google shows above the fold when someone types a town name and the word groomer. Those listings are almost always drawn from the top tenth, and the top tenth starts at 175 reviews.
So the median is a floor check, not a target. The number to aim at is 175, and the useful thing about grooming is that you touch more customers per week than almost any other local trade. A one-chair groomer doing six dogs a day gets 120 chances a month to ask.
The bottom of the distribution is crowded
5.6% of grooming listings have no reviews at all. 22.7% are under 10 and 40% are under 25. Only 22.8% have crossed 100 and 1.2% have passed 500. The mean of 73.9 is dragged upward by a handful of multi-van operations and large boarding-and-grooming facilities, so it describes nobody. Use the percentiles.
The practical read: in a city with sixty groomers, roughly two dozen have review counts too low to ever appear in a map pack. That is an open lane for whoever builds the habit of asking at checkout.
Ratings do not separate anybody
Average rating across the dataset is 4.6 stars. 78.9% of groomers sit at 4.5 or above and 26% show a perfect 5.0, usually because they have four reviews. A 4.9 does not distinguish you. Volume and recency do. A groomer at 4.7 with 210 reviews beats a groomer at 5.0 with 11, in Google's ranking and in the pet owner's head, every time.
Where rating does matter is the floor. 5.5% of groomers are below 4.0, and in this niche a sub-4.0 rating usually means a handling or injury complaint sitting near the top of the profile. That single review costs more bookings than any ad campaign gains. It has to be answered, calmly and specifically, in public.
The website gap
26.3% of grooming businesses list no website on their Google profile. Groomers with a site show a median of 47 reviews. Groomers without one show 20. We are not claiming the website produces the reviews. Owners who take the business seriously tend to do both. But the correlation is wide enough to be useful in two ways: a competitor with no site is unlikely to fight you for the map pack, and a missing site is the single clearest hole to close if it is yours.
There is a second cost the table does not show. A site that answers the four questions every pet owner asks before calling, breed, price, duration and safety, removes several phone calls a day from a person who is holding a wet dog.
Hours tell the whole scheduling story
34.2% of grooming listings show no hours at all. 50.4% list Saturday hours and only 18.3% list Sunday. Weekends are when working pet owners want a groom, and half the field is closed or silent. If you take Saturday appointments, that fact belongs in your hours, your profile description and your ads, because it is a genuine differentiator against the other half.
98% have at least one photo, so photos are not an edge, they are a baseline. And 21% publish an email address, which matters more than it looks: vets, rescues and pet stores refer by email, and they cannot refer to a listing with no way to reach you off the phone.
What to do with this
- Open your own Google Business Profile and write down four numbers: review count, rating, whether a website is linked, and whether Saturday hours are listed.
- Place yourself against the percentiles. Under 38 is the bottom half. Under 92 is the bottom three quarters. 175 and up is where the map pack lives.
- If you are in the 26.3% with no website, fix that before anything else. Five pages with tap-to-call, a breed price range and an online booking link is a week of evenings. See website essentials.
- Start asking at checkout, every client, while the dog is clean. One review a day moves a 30-review shop past the 75th percentile inside a year. Scripts are in the reviews guide.
- Fill in real hours, add Saturday if you work it, and publish a contact email so vets and pet stores can send referrals.
- Only then buy traffic. Ads pointed at a profile with nine reviews and no site pay for your competitor's education. Run the calculator first and fix the phone.
Method
This report aggregates 20,247 public Google Business Profile listings collected from Google Maps searches for pet groomers across every US state, deduplicated by place. Review counts and ratings are as displayed on the listing at collection time. "Website listed" means the profile links to any URL; we classify the URL as an owned domain, a social profile, or a free site builder by hostname. Figures are refreshed monthly. Cite this page as: More Pet Grooming Clients, "Pet groomers on Google benchmark report", 2026.