Is 4.5 a good Google rating? What the stars mean in different countries

One average, many audiences

Google's star rating is simple by design. According to Google's own help pages, it is the average of all the ratings published for a place, on a scale from 1 to 5. Nothing in that number adjusts for who wrote the reviews, where they come from or what "good" means to them.

That's why a single cut-off such as "only places with 4.5 or more" works well in some countries and badly in others. Across all the places on our lists, the median rating is 4.5 and 59% are rated 4.5 or higher. That overall figure hides a wide spread: from 38% of places at 4.5+ in Japan to 88% in Czechia.

The benchmark: 21 countries side by side

The table covers all 21 countries on our lists, ordered from the most generous median rating to the strictest. "At 4.5+" is the share of places rated 4.5 or higher, "At 4.8+" the share rated 4.8 or higher, and "Median reviews" the review count of the middle place.

Strict raters and generous raters

At one end sit Japan and India, both with a median of 4.4. In Japan, only 38% of the places on our lists reach 4.5 and 14% reach 4.8, so a Japanese 4.5 is already in the upper part of the list. India is close behind, with 42% at 4.5 or higher.

At the other end, Czechia, Thailand, Brazil and the UK all have a median of 4.7, and only 12–15% of their places are rated below 4.5. There, a 4.5 sits in the lower part of the list, below the typical place. Brazil stands out: a third of the places on our Brazilian lists (33%) are rated 4.8 or higher, the highest share in the table.

Most of the rest — the other European countries, the USA, Mexico, the United Arab Emirates, Argentina and Australia — form a broad middle band with a median of 4.6 and 68–84% of places at 4.5 or higher. South Korea (median 4.5, 68%) and Türkiye (median 4.5, 59%) are a step stricter.

Why the gap exists

Part of it is who writes the reviews. A study published in Information Systems Research in 2025, based on about 71,000 restaurant reviews from a large Chinese review platform, found that people were at least 13.4% more likely to give a restaurant a higher rating when they reviewed it as tourists than as locals. The researchers found the gap wasn't explained by tourists choosing pricier restaurants or getting better service, and link it to the emotional lift of being away from home, when people tend to be more excited and more forgiving. Places that serve mostly visitors can therefore look better on paper than they would to locals.

Part of it may be how people use rating scales. A classic 1995 study in Psychological Science, based on high-school students in Japan, Taiwan, Canada and the US, found that the Japanese and Taiwanese students chose the midpoint of rating scales more often than the two North American groups, while the US students chose the extreme values most often. The differences were small, though statistically significant. Survey answers are not Google reviews, so this is a plausible contributor rather than proof, but it fits Japan's place at the strict end of the table.

And part of it is our own sample. Several countries are represented mostly by one large, heavily visited city — Bangkok for Thailand, Prague for Czechia, London for the UK, Buenos Aires for Argentina — while the Japanese figures come from nearly 40 cities, many of them mid-sized towns. Romania's figures come from Craiova, not Bucharest. Brazil is a useful counter-example: alongside Rio de Janeiro, our Brazilian lists include Maringá and smaller towns around it in Paraná, which are far from the main tourist routes, and Brazil still has the most generous ratings in the table.

Review counts differ even more

Volume varies far more than stars. The median place on our lists has 881 reviews. In Argentina it has 4,598, in Austria 4,175, in Mexico 4,030 and in the UK 3,781; in Romania only 320, in Japan 481 and in Germany 542. So 500 reviews is above the median on our Japanese lists and roughly a ninth of the median in Argentina.

Small counts are common in some countries and rare in others: 23% of the places on our Brazilian lists have fewer than 100 reviews, as do 21% in India and 20% in Japan, against 1% in Thailand, Argentina, Czechia and Australia. A place with 80 reviews is unremarkable on our Japanese lists; on our Bangkok list it would be one of a handful.

Our ranking deals with this in a simple way. The quality part of our "Best" score starts every place from a neutral 4.0 and lets its own average take over as reviews accumulate; a place needs roughly 300 reviews before its own rating counts for more than that starting point. A 4.8 with 320 reviews scores about 4.41 on that measure, and a 4.8 with 4,598 reviews about 4.75. That is deliberately cautious with low-volume places, and it's one reason our lists are always ranked within a single city rather than across countries.

The type of place matters too

The kind of place moves the benchmark as much as the country does. Across all our lists, restaurants, cafés, bars and spas have a median of 4.6, while parks sit at 4.4 and shopping places (mostly malls) at 4.3, with only 21% rated 4.5 or higher. Categories where places collect thousands of reviews rarely hold a 4.8: just 1% of shopping places, 5% of parks and 8% of attractions do, against 28% of restaurants and bars and 32% of spas.

A rule of thumb for your next trip

Compare a place with the local median, not with 5.0. In practice:

• Find the local benchmark: the country table above, or the ratings of the top places in that city's list on our site.
• Read a rating against it: the middle of our lists is 4.4 in Japan and 4.7 in Brazil, so the same 4.5 is above average in one and below average in the other.
• Check the review count against the local median as well: 300 reviews is typical in Craiova and well under a tenth of the median in Vienna.
• Compare like with like: a 4.4 park or a 4.3 mall is about normal, while the same score for a café or a bar is below the median.
• Read a few reviews in the local language. Visitors tend to rate higher than locals, so locals' reviews are a useful check, especially near the big sights.
• Look at the most recent reviews too. The average includes every rating ever published, so it can be slow to reflect a recent change.

What these numbers can't tell you

These are benchmarks for the places on our lists, not for every business in each country. Keep in mind:

• Our lists are built from the places Google returns for searches such as "best restaurants in Lisbon", keeping only places with at least 20 reviews. That is already a selection of well-known, mostly well-rated places, so the medians are higher than they would be for all businesses.
• Japan accounts for 3,834 of the 9,778 places (39%), so it pulls the overall figures down. The overall median of 4.5 is not a world average.
• Some samples are small: Australia has 82 places, Romania 131 and Germany 140, each drawn mainly from a single city (Sydney, Craiova and Essen).
• Medians are taken from the ratings as Google displays them, so they move in steps of 0.1.
• Ratings and review counts change every day. These figures are from the snapshot of 13 October 2026.