What is a review snippet?

Review snippet, explained

Google's review snippet docs list the types it supports, including book, course, event, local business, movie, product, recipe and software app, plus several other Schema.org types. A single review needs an author, a reviewRating and the item reviewed. An aggregate rating needs a ratingValue and at least one of ratingCount or reviewCount.

The rules that trip people up are about honesty. Reviews must be visible on the page: Google says users should be able to see the text of the review and the rating, and the aggregate rating. Don't aggregate reviews or ratings from other websites. And there's a self-serving rule: for LocalBusiness and Organization types, if the entity being reviewed controls the reviews about itself, its pages aren't eligible for star review snippets. Putting a testimonial carousel on your homepage and marking it up as an organization rating won't get you stars.

For software, stars can appear through SoftwareApplication markup, which requires a rating or review. The ratings still need to reflect real reviews visible on the page. Fake or incentivized reviews without disclosure break Google's guidelines and can lead to a manual action.

If you don't have real reviews yet, don't add rating markup. It's one of the easiest ways to lose rich result eligibility across a site.

Why it matters for founders

Stars are eye-catching, which is exactly why Google polices them. Founders tempted to mark up testimonials as ratings should know it won't work and can backfire.

Example

Your app's page shows 40 user reviews collected in-app, with an average of 4.6. You add aggregateRating to your SoftwareApplication markup using those numbers, and it passes the Rich Results Test.

Common mistakes

• Marking up self-controlled testimonials as Organization ratings.
• Ratings copied from G2 or another site.
• Review markup with no visible reviews on the page.
• Inventing a rating before you have reviews.