Review schema

Long definition

Review and AggregateRating are schema.org types that let a page declare reviews in machine-readable form. When implemented correctly with JSON-LD, Google can render the gold-star rating below the page's title in the SERP — a rich result that historically drove a meaningful CTR lift.

September 2019 was the inflection point. Google announced that reviews about an entity (a business, a product) cannot earn a star-rating rich result when those reviews are hosted on the entity's own site, unless the reviews come from a third-party review platform integrated into the page. The policy targeted years of abuse — businesses self-publishing five-star reviews and marking them up for free SERP stars.

The currently allowed itemReviewed types for review-rich-result eligibility are a closed list (Book, Course, Event, HowTo, LocalBusiness, MediaObject, Movie, Product, Recipe, SoftwareApplication, and a handful of others). Critically, Organization and generic services are not on the list — a service business cannot self-mark-up testimonials and earn stars. The right path is third-party platforms (Trustpilot, Yotpo, Google reviews via GBP) which Google reads independently.

Implementation lives in JSON-LD inside <script type="application/ld+json">. Required properties for AggregateRating: ratingValue, reviewCount (or ratingCount), and itemReviewed with the right type and identifying properties. For Review: author, reviewRating, reviewBody, datePublished. Missing or invented values trigger structured-data manual actions, one of the few schema-driven manual penalties Google still issues.

Validation: the Rich Results Test and Search Console's "Review snippets" report show eligibility, errors, and warnings. Eligibility is necessary but not sufficient — Google chooses when to show the rich result based on quality and query.

Common misconceptions

• "More reviews in schema = bigger stars." The display is the same regardless of count. Beyond the eligibility threshold (a handful of reviews), additional reviews do not change the visual.
• "Self-published testimonials with schema still earn stars." They don't, since 2019. Self-serving reviews are explicitly excluded from rich-result eligibility for most itemReviewed types.
• "Review schema is a ranking factor." It's a presentation feature. The CTR uplift from stars can indirectly help rankings (better engagement signals), but the schema markup itself is not a ranking input.
• "You can mark up Trustpilot reviews on your own site." Only when you display the actual third-party reviews via Trustpilot's integrations. Hand-copying their reviews into your HTML and marking them up is policy-violating.