In Astana 12% of businesses have no reviews at all, in Kostanay 55%. Across Kazakhstan 6,982 of 26,636 salons, studios and clinics are silent, every fourth one
| city | businesses | no reviews | share | reviews per business |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Astana | 5,058 | 598 | 12% | 50 |
| Ust-Kamenogorsk | 907 | 141 | 16% | 26 |
| Almaty | 7,946 | 1,389 | 17% | 40 |
| Pavlodar | 826 | 167 | 20% | 20 |
| Karaganda | 1,318 | 271 | 21% | 20 |
| Petropavlovsk | 394 | 105 | 27% | 7 |
| Aktobe | 945 | 276 | 29% | 10 |
| Uralsk | 783 | 260 | 33% | 10 |
| Atyrau | 766 | 254 | 33% | 13 |
| Kokshetau | 493 | 162 | 33% | 17 |
| Aktau | 992 | 373 | 38% | 10 |
| Taraz | 552 | 218 | 39% | 5 |
| Shymkent | 2,121 | 897 | 42% | 11 |
| Semey | 461 | 212 | 46% | 6 |
| Kyzylorda | 407 | 215 | 53% | 2 |
| Kostanay | 980 | 538 | 55% | 5 |
Between the extreme cities the gap is twenty-five times in reviews per business. A salon in Astana has fifty reviews on average. A salon in Kyzylorda has two
In Almaty and Astana reviews work: most businesses have enough of them to compare and choose. In Kostanay, Kyzylorda and Semey there is almost nothing to compare: more than half of the listings are empty, and the rest have a handful of reviews
A decade and a half of reviews already add up to a picture. Two reviews give no picture: one unhappy client drags the rating down by a whole point
It is not only about the number of residents. Shymkent is the third largest city in the country by population, and 42% of businesses there have no reviews. That is worse than in Karaganda, a city four times smaller, with its 21%
Reviews are written where people are used to searching through a directory. Where it is customary to ask acquaintances, a business works for years with a full schedule and without a single review
Five signs you can see even without reviews
The source is the open 2GIS directory, a snapshot as of August 24, 2026. We took 194 beauty and health categories, merged the rows of one firm by its number, and took reviews from the "number of reviews" field. Cities with fewer than 300 businesses did not make it into the table: on small numbers the share jumps and there is nothing to compare
We do not give business ratings: they are calculated from the same reviews, and where there are two reviews a rating measures nothing
Numbers in this article come from our own database of public directories in Kazakhstan, counted on August 24, 2026. We count them ourselves and never take them from other reports