Schema Markup·4 min read

Review Schema and Star Ratings: What Qualifies

Stars under a search result draw the eye, which is why review markup is one of the most requested and most misused kinds of structured data. Google shows review snippets only for certain item types and only under certain rules, and a lot of review markup on the web will never earn a star. This guide explains what qualifies, how Review and AggregateRating differ, the four valid ways to nest them, and the self-serving rule that trips up local businesses. The Review Schema Generator on this site writes all four patterns from one form.

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What a review snippet is

Stars, a score and sometimes a reviewer.

A review snippet is the rating line Google can add to a result: stars, the average score and the number of ratings, or for a single critic review, the score and the reviewer. It comes from Review or AggregateRating markup on the page, nested in or pointing at the thing being reviewed.

Google supports review snippets for a fixed list of item types: Book, Course, CreativeWorkSeason, CreativeWorkSeries, Episode, Event, Game, HowTo, LocalBusiness, MediaObject, Movie, MusicPlaylist, MusicRecording, Organization, Product, Recipe and SoftwareApplication. A rating on anything else, such as a Service or a WebPage, is valid Schema.org but will not earn stars.

Review or AggregateRating

One opinion versus many.

A Review is one person's or one publication's opinion of an item. It needs an author with a real name, a reviewRating with a ratingValue, and the reviewed item with at least a name. Google recommends the date and the scale, bestRating and worstRating, which default to 5 and 1 when you leave them out.

An AggregateRating is the average of many ratings. It needs a ratingValue and either a ratingCount, the number of ratings, or a reviewCount, the number of written reviews. A product page often carries both: the average from all buyers, plus one or a few featured reviews.

In the generator, choose One review, Average rating or Both. The form then shows the fields each needs, and the Validation panel marks anything required that is still empty.

Four valid ways to structure it

Nested inside the item, or pointing at it.

Google accepts four shapes. A Review with itemReviewed suits a review article, where the page is the review and the item is something else. An item with a nested review suits a page about the item that shows one review. An AggregateRating with itemReviewed suits a page that shows only a rating summary. An item carrying both aggregateRating and review suits a product or recipe page with an average and reviews.

Pick the shape that matches what the page is about. A review blog writing about someone else's headphones uses Review with itemReviewed. The shop selling those headphones nests its buyers' average rating inside its Product markup. Both are correct; they describe different pages.

The self-serving rule

Why a business's own reviews earn no stars.

Since 2019 Google has not shown review stars for what it calls self-serving reviews: reviews of a LocalBusiness or Organization published by that same business on its own site, whether typed in by hand or pulled from a widget. A dentist who marks up patient testimonials on the dentist's own homepage gets no stars from them.

The markup is still valid, and other search engines may read it, but it is not a route to stars in Google. Third-party pages are different: a local guide reviewing restaurants can mark up its own reviews of those restaurants. The generator shows a note whenever you pick LocalBusiness, Restaurant or Organization as the item type, so the rule is never a surprise.

Pros and cons for product reviews

positiveNotes and negativeNotes.

For editorial product reviews, Google can show a short list of pros and cons from the review. They are written as positiveNotes and negativeNotes, each an ItemList of ListItem entries with a name. In the generator, type each advantage on its own line under Pros and each drawback under Cons.

They should match the pros and cons visible in the review itself. Google only uses them for product reviews written by an editor or expert, not for reviews on a shop's own product page, and the tool warns when you add them to another item type.

A worked example

An editorial headphone review.

Load the example in the tool. It is a single review, structured as a Review with itemReviewed, of a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. The item is a Product with a brand and a price. The review has an author, a publisher, a title, a date, a 4.5 rating on a 1 to 5 scale, the review text, three pros and two cons.

The output reads, in short: {"@type": "Review", "name": "Great noise cancelling, average microphone", "author": {"@type": "Person", "name": "Sam Okafor"}, "reviewRating": {"@type": "Rating", "ratingValue": "4.5", "bestRating": "5", "worstRating": "1"}, "positiveNotes": {...}, "negativeNotes": {...}, "itemReviewed": {"@type": "Product", "name": "Aeris 2 Noise-Cancelling Headphones", ...}}. Switch the structure to Item with a nested review and the same data is written with the Product on the outside.

Checks before you publish

The reasons stars fail to appear.

Run through these before pasting the block.

The reviews and the rating are visible on the page, in the same numbers as the markup.
Ratings come from your own users or your own editorial team, never copied from another site.
The author is a real person or organization name under 100 characters, not a label such as Admin.
The item type is one Google supports, and the review is not about the business publishing it.
The rating sits inside the scale you declared; a 6 on a 1 to 5 scale is an error the Validation panel catches.
Test the code with Test in Google Rich Results Test, and the live page once it is published.

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