What is review schema?
Review schema is the structured data that describes customer reviews and ratings on a page, including the individual reviews and the aggregate rating with its review count.
Worked example, not a result
Marking up ratings honestly
Say a product page shows 214 reviews with an average of 4.3, listed beneath the description where any shopper can read them. The markup describes the same thing: an aggregate rating with its value, the scale it sits on, and the number of reviews behind it, plus the individual reviews with their authors and dates.
Two boundaries matter here. The reviews must be about the item on that page, so a company wide rating repeated on every product is not product review markup. And the reviews have to be visible on the page itself, because the markup describes what is there rather than adding something that is not.
The temptation, especially on a new store, is to mark up a rating gathered from somewhere else or averaged across the range. That is a policy breach rather than an optimisation, and losing enhanced results across the whole site is a much bigger cost than a few products having no stars yet.
The figures here are an example.
Why it matters
Stars in a search result change how many people click a listing they can already see, which makes review markup one of the few changes that improves the visitors lever without touching rankings, ad spend or content.
The reviews behind it do more than that. They answer the objections that stop shoppers on a product page, which is conversion work, and they surface the sizing, fit and durability questions that drive returns. Collecting reviews properly therefore pays into two levers at once, and the markup is simply how that work becomes visible outside the store.
For a store owner the sequence is worth getting right. Collect genuine reviews through a post purchase request, display them on the product page, then mark them up. Starting at the markup end, with ratings borrowed from elsewhere, risks the whole site's eligibility for enhanced results.
Common mistakes
- Applying a site wide rating to every product. Product review markup describes reviews of that product, and using a company score instead is a misuse of the type.
- Marking up reviews that are not shown on the page. The structured data has to describe visible content, not supplement it.
- Including reviews the store wrote or solicited in exchange for a rating. That is a bigger risk than missing stars, and it undermines the reviews that are genuine.
- Leaving negative reviews out of the display. A page of uniformly perfect scores reads as filtered and lowers trust rather than raising it.
Related terms and answers
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