Should review replies be templated or personalized?

Short answer

Personalized. Google can flag repetitive, copy-pasted replies as spam, and customers can spot a canned response instantly. Templates are fine as a starting skeleton, but each reply should reference the specific review.

Why personalization wins

• It reads as genuine and shows you actually read the review.
• It avoids the duplicate-content problem of identical replies across dozens of reviews.
• It lets you echo the customer's own words, which lands better.

The trick is doing it at scale — personalizing every reply by hand is what makes businesses give up. AI that drafts a unique, on-brand reply per review solves exactly that, without the copy-paste look.