How Our Review Schema Works

Review and AggregateRating markup is published only where genuine reviews exist and are visible to a visitor on the same page. This is the whole discipline of the service: rating markup describing reviews a reader cannot see, or aggregated from a third-party platform without being displayed, misrepresents the page and risks a manual action against the site, which costs far more than the stars are worth. Markup is attached to the specific thing reviewed, a product, service or organisation, rather than floated on an unrelated page. Individual Review nodes carry author, reviewBody, datePublished and a reviewRating with an explicit bestRating and worstRating so the scale is unambiguous. AggregateRating carries ratingValue with both ratingCount and reviewCount where the two differ. Self-serving reviews of the business on its own pages are not marked up where the guidelines exclude them. Where reviews live on a third-party platform, they are surfaced under that platform's own terms rather than copied. Markup is validated and re-checked on the served page after deployment.