Towing companies on Google: the 2026 benchmark report
Review counts, star ratings, website presence and 24-hour claims for 23,074 towing companies, computed from public Google Business Profile listings across 49 states.
Reviews
| Review count | Value |
|---|---|
| Median | 31 |
| Average (mean) | 100.2 |
| 25th percentile | 8 |
| 75th percentile | 95 |
| 90th percentile | 219 |
Share of towing companies by review count:
| Bucket | Share of listings |
|---|---|
| 0 reviews | 4.8% |
| Under 10 | 27.1% |
| Under 25 | 45.1% |
| 100 or more | 23.9% |
| 500 or more | 3.1% |
Ratings
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Average rating | 4.37 |
| Rated 5.0 | 28.5% |
| Rated 4.5 or higher | 61.8% |
| Rated under 4.0 | 20.5% |
| No rating yet | 4.1% |
Websites
| Website status | Share |
|---|---|
| Website listed | 63.3% |
| No website listed | 36.7% |
| Own domain | 59.9% |
| Social profile only | 2.4% |
| Free or DIY builder | 1% |
Median review count for towing companies with a website: 47. Without one: 17.
Profile completeness and hours
| Profile field | Share |
|---|---|
| Has a profile photo | 97.3% |
| Public email on profile | 19.6% |
| Open 24 hours | 50.7% |
| Open Saturday | 61.2% |
| Open Sunday | 55.8% |
| No hours listed | 30.7% |
Where the listings are
| State | Listings |
|---|---|
| CA | 1,767 |
| FL | 1,421 |
| TX | 1,339 |
| GA | 722 |
| NC | 712 |
| IL | 628 |
| OH | 570 |
| PA | 556 |
| MI | 498 |
| VA | 496 |
| NY | 478 |
| WA | 458 |
Primary categories
| Google category | Listings |
|---|---|
| Towing service | 21,635 |
| Auto repair shop | 499 |
| Auto body shop | 122 |
| Towing equipment provider | 103 |
| (blank) | 102 |
| Auto wrecker | 92 |
| Truck repair shop | 66 |
| Tire shop | 59 |
Start with the median, not the average
Half of all towing companies on Google have 31 reviews or fewer. That is the number to place yourself against first. The average in the set is 100.2, but that figure is dragged upward by a few hundred large multi-yard operations with thousands of reviews each.
The percentiles are the honest ruler. The 25th percentile is 8 reviews. The 75th is 95. The 90th is 219. Google shows three businesses in the local pack, and in any city with real call volume the three showing up sit near or above that 90th percentile. 45.1% of towing companies have fewer than 25 reviews, and 4.8% have none at all.
Ratings are the towing industry's real problem
This is where towing looks nothing like plumbing, roofing or HVAC. The average rating across the dataset is 4.4 stars and 20.5% of towing companies sit below 4.0. In most consumer trades a sub-4.0 business is an outlier. In towing it is one in five.
The reason is structural. A meaningful share of tow volume is involuntary: private property impounds, police rotation calls, repossessions, parking enforcement. Those customers did not hire you, they are paying a release fee they resent, and some of them leave a one-star review on the way out of the lot. Meanwhile 61.8% of the industry is still at 4.5 or better and 28.5% shows a clean 5.0, usually because they have very few reviews.
The practical read: you cannot prevent the angry impound review, so you have to outnumber it. A yard doing 30 retail calls a week that asks every one of them will bury involuntary complaints inside a month. A yard doing the same work and asking nobody watches its rating fall a tenth of a star at a time.
The website gap
36.7% of towing companies list no website on their Google profile, and only 63.3% do. Companies with a site linked have a median of 47 reviews. Companies without one have 17. That is close to a three to one spread.
The website is not producing the reviews. Operators who take the marketing side seriously tend to do both. But the gap is still the single clearest signal of which competitors in your radius are going to fight you for the map pack and which are just parked there. If you are in the 36.7%, closing that gap is a week of work and it is the cheapest position change available to you.
The 24-hour claim, and who is lying
50.7% of towing companies list themselves as open 24 hours. 30.7% list no hours whatsoever, which means Google has nothing useful to show a caller at 11 p.m. and often shows nothing at all. 61.2% show Saturday hours and 55.8% show Sunday.
Two things follow from that. First, listing 24 hours when the overnight line goes to voicemail is the most expensive lie in this industry: Google sends you the 2 a.m. call, nobody picks up, and you get a one-star review from someone who never became a customer. Second, if you genuinely do answer overnight and you have not said so on the profile, you are giving away the highest-margin calls of the week to whoever did.
Profile completeness otherwise is high. 97.3% have at least one photo, so a profile with none is instantly in the bottom few percent. Only 19.6% publish an email address, which matters little here because nobody emails for a tow.
What to do with this
- Open your own Google Business Profile and write down four numbers: review count, star rating, whether a website is linked, and what your listed hours say.
- Place yourself on the ruler. Below 31 reviews is the bottom half. Below 95 is the bottom three quarters. 219 and up is where map pack winners live in a competitive city.
- Fix the hours today. Make the listing match who actually answers the phone, and add missed-call text-back to cover any hour you do not staff. Run the calculator to see what those hours are worth.
- If you are in the 36.7% with no site, build five fast pages with tap-to-call above the fold. The checklist is in the website guide.
- Set a review target tied to retail calls, not total calls. One ask per retail drop-off, every shift. The scripts are in the reviews guide.
- Only after those four should you turn on paid ads. Ads pointed at a profile with 9 reviews, no website and fake 24-hour hours pay for your competitor's next truck.
Method
This report aggregates 23,074 public Google Business Profile listings collected from Google Maps searches for towing companies 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 Tow Calls, "Towing companies on Google benchmark report", 2026.