A review is someone’s evaluation of something. We support reviews and ratings for a wide range of schema.org types, including businesses, products, and different creative works such as books or movies.
Google displays the following types of reviews in search results:
- Critic reviews: A snippet from a longer review article that a single editor has created, curated, or compiled for a publisher.
- Review snippets: A rich snippet of a review or rating markup from a review website, usually an average of the combined rating scores from reviewers. Review snippets appear in Google Search results either under the search result or in the Google Knowledge Cards.
To participate, implement the markup, follow the guidelines for either critic reviews or review snippets, and register your interest in the pilot.
Critic reviews
With your critic reviews displayed prominently in Google Search results, your readers will be able to easily find them and navigate to your website to read the complete reviews. Critic reviews appear in Search results with a snippet from the critic, the critic’s name and the publisher icon. You can supply critic reviews for the following content types:
- Local businesses
- Movies
- Books
If you publish critic reviews and follow our guidelines, register your interest in the pilot.
Critic review examples
Business reviews
EMBEDDED REVIEW
You can embed critic reviews inside your business listings. This is useful for sites that provide booking services for many businesses or for business listing aggregators.
STANDALONE REVIEWS
You can provide standalone review blocks, which is suitable markup for sites that perform no direct function for the business being reviewed, such as news sites.
Critic review guidelines
In addition to the general structured data guidelines, review markup should follow the general guidelines and content-type guidelines listed below.
GENERAL
To be eligible for critic reviews, be aware of the following general guidelines:
- Authoritative human editor(s) must create, curate, or compile content for critic reviews.
- Profanity and vulgar language are discouraged. Reviews should be appropriate for a broad and diverse audience. Consequently, reviews containing vulgar or profane language may be ineligible for use.
- Refer clearly to a specific product or service. Do this by nesting the review or ratings within the markup of another schema.org type—such as schema.org/Book or schema.org/LocalBusiness —or by using that schema.org typed element as a value for the
itemReviewed
property. - Make sure the reviews and ratings you mark up are readily available to users from the marked-up page. It should be immediately obvious to users that the page has review or ratings content.
- Provide review and/or rating information about a specific item, not about a category or a list of items. For example, “hotels in Madrid,” “summer dresses,” or “cake recipes” are not specific items. See also our structured data guidelines for multiple entities on the same page.
- No reviews are shown for adult-related products or services.
- Single reviewer name needs to be valid. For example, “50% off until Saturday” is not a valid name for a reviewer.
- Ratings that don’t use a 5-point scale: By default, Google assumes that your site uses a 5-point scale, where 5 is the best possible rating and 1 is the worst, but you can use any other scale. If you do, you can mark up the best and worst ratings, and Google will scale that to the 5-star system used in rich snippets.
LOCAL BUSINESSES
The following guidelines apply to critic reviews of local businesses:
- Snippets must not be written or provided by the business or content provider unless they are genuine, independent, and unpaid editorial reviews.
- Critic reviews must allow for customers to express both positive and negative sentiments. They may not be vetted by the business or restricted by the content provider based on the positive/negative sentiment of the review before submission to Google.
- Critic reviews cannot be template sentences built from data or automated metrics. For example, the following is not acceptable: “Based on X number of responses, on average people experienced X with this business.”
- Critic reviews for multiple-location businesses such as retail chains or franchises can only be submitted for the specific business location for which they were written. In other words, critic reviews for multiple-location businesses cannot be syndicated or applied to all business locations of the same company.
- There can’t be any commercial agreements (paid or otherwise) to provide critic reviews between the content provider and the reviewed business.
- Do not include critic reviews that are duplicate or similar across many businesses.
- Only include critic reviews that have been directly produced by your site, not reviews from third- party sites or syndicated reviews.
MOVIES AND BOOKS
The following guidelines apply to critic reviews of movies and books:
- The snippet must be an exact excerpt from the long-form body of the review. It should not be the review headline, a question or a teaser.
- The snippet must clearly indicate an opinion about the review subject. It should not be factual (e.g. “Gravity” is a film by Alfonso Cuarón) or a plot synopsis (e.g. Dr. Ryan Stone is an engineer on her first space mission).
- The snippet must make sense on its own and should not be confusing to someone who isn’t reading the whole article.
- The snippet must be complete (not cut off, truncated, or ending in elllipses) and well-formed (having correct punctuation and grammar) thought.
Critic review properties
The following properties should be populated for all reviews, regardless of the review subject.
Properties | |
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aggregateRating | Aggregate RatingAnnotation for the average score assigned to the item being reviewed. This typically applies to user ratings rather than professional critic ratings. |
aggregateRating. | Text The highest value allowed in the reviewer’s rating system. If this field is omitted, 5 is assumed. Letter grades are allowed, e.g. “A”. |
aggregateRating. | Number The number of ratings given to the reviewed item. |
aggregateRating. | Text The average rating given to the reviewed item. Letter grades are allowed, e.g. “B+”. |
aggregateRating. | Text The lowest value allowed in the reviewer’s rating system. If this field is omitted, 1 is assumed. Letter grades are allowed, e.g. “C-“. |
author | Person or Organization, recommendedThe author of the review. The reviewer’s name needs to be a valid name. |
author. | Text, recommendedName of the author of the review. Provide the full name of the author. The value should be capitalized correctly. Names comprised of entirely uppercase or lowercase letters will be edited such that the first letter of every word is capitalized. |
author. | URL, recommendedURL to a page that unambiguously identified the author, e.g. the author’s official website, a profile page, a Wikipedia article. |
datePublished | Date, requiredDate of the review’s first publication, in ISO 8601 date format. |
description | Text, requiredSnippet from the body of the actual review that captures the author’s opinion about the review subject. This snippet will be used on the Google Search result page, as shown in the mocks above. All of the following criteria should be met, else the review will be excluded from the feature.The snippet cannot exceed 200 characters.Use non-smart double quotation marks (“) to denote titles, e.g. “”Gravity” is the best movie.”Follow the critic review guidelines in the content of the snippet. |
inLanguage | Text, recommendedThe BCP-47 language code of the review description, e.g. “ja” is Japanese. Strongly recommended for non-English reviews. |
itemReviewed | Local business, Movie, Book, requiredAnnotation for the subject being reviewed. See below for details of each type of review. |
publisher | Organization, requiredAnnotation for the publisher of the review. |
publisher. | Text, requiredName of the publisher of the review, e.g. “The New York Times.” |
publisher. | URL, recommendedThe URL of the publisher’s official website or Wikipedia page. |
reviewRating | Rating, EndorsementRating, recommendedRating: The rating given in this review. A nested Rating or more specific subtype, most typically AggregateRating.EndorsementRating: A rating that expresses some level of positive endorsement for the item being reviewed. For example, inclusion in a “critic’s pick” blog, a “Like” or “+1″ on a social network. EndorsementRating is a rating by itself (for example, “2 thumbs up”), while a Rating is a scale (3/5 stars).Here’s an example:”reviewRating”: [{ “@type”: “Rating”, “ratingValue”: “3.0”, “bestRating”: “5”, “worstRating”: “0” }, { “@type”: “EndorsementRating”, “name”: “2 thumbs up”, “ratingValue”: “2” }]Additional EndorsementRating guidelines:We recommend using a text string up to a few words in length (approximately 10-15 characters).An Endorsement Rating may be part of a numeric scale or organized system.If the scale is not numeric, try to indicate that the endorsement is positive to help consumers understand that the rating is broadly positive. |
reviewRating. | Text *The highest value allowed in this rating system.* Required if the rating system is not on a 5-point scale. If bestRating is omitted, 5 is assumed. |
reviewRating. | Text The rating given to the reviewed item. Letter grades are allowed. For example, “B+”. |
reviewRating. | Text *The lowest value allowed in this rating system.* Required if the rating system is not on a 5-point scale. If worstRating is omitted, 1 is assumed. |
URL | URL Canonical URL of the web page that contains the full text of the review.If no value is provided, Google assumes that the crawled page is the location of the review in its entirety.If your structured data is on a page other than the one containing the full text of the review, or if you have multiple URLs for the full-text review, you must populate this field.The webpage indicated by this field must contain a full-length review that is longer than 300 words. |
Review subject properties
In addition to the critic review properties, you must define the specific properties for the review type that you want to implement.LOCAL BUSINESSMOVIEBOOK
Properties | |
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itemReviewed. | Text, requiredName of the business that is the subject of the review. |
itemReviewed. | URL, requiredURL to a page that unambiguously identifies the business. The official website of the business is strongly preferred. |
itemReviewed. | PostalAddress, requiredAddress of the specific business location. |
itemReviewed. | Text, requiredStreet number, street name, and unit number (if applicable). |
itemReviewed. | Text, requiredCity. |
itemReviewed. | Text, required, where applicableState or province. |
itemReviewed. | Text, requiredPostal or zip code. |
itemReviewed. | Text, requiredThe 2-letter ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code. |
itemReviewed. | GeoCoordinates Geographic coordinates of the business. |
itemReviewed. | Numeric, recommendedThe latitude of the business location. The precision should be at least 5 decimal places. |
itemReviewed. | Numeric, recommendedThe longitude of the business location. The precision should be at least 5 decimal places. |
itemReviewed. | Text, recommendedBusiness phone number, inclusive of country code. Specify the public phone number of the business normally used by customers. |
Review snippets
When Google finds valid reviews or ratings markup, we may show a rich snippet that includes stars and other summary info from reviews or ratings. In addition to the text of the review, a rating is an evaluation described on a numeric scale (such as 1 to 5). You can supply ratings for the following content types:
- Local businesses
- Movies
- Books
- Music
- Products
Review snippet examples
Types of features
SIMPLE REVIEW
Shows the key properties for a simple review.
EMBEDDED REVIEW
You can embed a review into another schema.org type using its review property.
REVIEW WITH RATING
You can add ratings to your reviews.
Rating types
You can omit the rating for an individual review if your marked-up content contains both an author and a review date. For aggregate reviews, you must supply the average rating for the rich snippet to display.
AGGREGATE RATING
Example of marking up an aggregate rating.
Review snippet guidelines
In addition to the general structured data guidelines, review markup should follow these additional guidelines
GENERAL
To be eligible for review snippets, be aware of the following general guidelines:
- Aggregate ratings: An aggregate evaluation of an item by many people should be marked up as a schema.org/AggregateRating. Google may display aggregate ratings as rich snippets or, for certain types of items, answers in search results.
- Refer clearly to a specific product or service. Do this by nesting the review or ratings within the markup of another schema.org type—such as schema.org/Book or schema.org/LocalBusiness —or by using that schema.org typed element as a value for the
itemReviewed
property. - Make sure the reviews and ratings you mark up are readily available to users from the marked-up page. It should be immediately obvious to users that the page has review or ratings content.
- Provide review and/or rating information about a specific item, not about a category or a list of items. For example, “hotels in Madrid,” “summer dresses,” or “cake recipes” are not specific items. See also our structured data guidelines for multiple entities on the same page.
- No reviews are shown for adult-related products or services.
- Single reviewer name needs to be valid. For example, “50% off until Saturday” is not a valid name for a reviewer.
- Ratings that don’t use a 5-point scale: By default, Google assumes that your site uses a 5-point scale, where 5 is the best possible rating and 1 is the worst, but you can use any other scale. If you do, you can mark up the best and worst ratings, and Google will scale that to the 5-star system used in rich snippets.
LOCAL BUSINESSES
Google may display information from aggregate ratings markup in the Google Knowledge Cards. The following guidelines apply to review snippets in knowledge cards for local businesses:
- Ratings must be sourced directly from users.
- Don’t rely on human editors to create, curate or compile ratings information for local businesses. These types of reviews are critic reviews.
- Sites must collect ratings information directly from users and not from other sites.
Review snippet definitions
Common review properties
Properties | |
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itemReviewed | Thing, required*The item that is being reviewed. This needs to be a valid schema.org type.* If the review is embedded into another schema.org type using the review property, the itemReviewed property can be omitted. |
reviewBody | Text, recommendedThe actual body of the review. |
author | Person or Organization, requiredThe author of the review. The reviewer’s name needs to be a valid name. |
datePublished | Date, recommendedThe date that the review was published, in ISO 8601 date format. |
reviewRating | Rating, recommendedThe rating given in this review. A nested Rating or more specific subtype, most typically AggregateRating. |
reviewRating. | Number, recommendedA numerical quality rating for the item. |
reviewRating. | Number, required *The highest value allowed in this rating system.* Required if the rating system is not on a 5-point scale. If bestRating is omitted, 5 is assumed. |
reviewRating. | Number, required *The lowest value allowed in this rating system.* Required if the rating system is not on a 5-point scale. If worstRating is omitted, 1 is assumed. |
publisher | Organization, recommendedThe publisher of the review. |
Aggregated rating properties
Properties | |
---|---|
itemReviewed | Thing, required*The item that is being rated. This needs to be a valid schema.org type.* If aggregate rating is embedded into another schema.org type, using aggregateRating property, then there is no need to mark up the itemReviewed property. |
ratingCount | Number, requiredThe total number of ratings for the item on your site. At least one of ratingCount or reviewCount is required. |
reviewCount | Number, requiredSpecifies the number of people who provided a review with or without an accompanying rating. At least one of ratingCount or reviewCount is required. |
ratingValue | Number, requiredA numerical quality rating for the item. |
bestRating | Number, required*The highest value allowed in this rating system.* Required if the rating system is not a 5-point scale. If bestRating is omitted, 5 is assumed. |
worstRating | Number, required*The lowest value allowed in this rating system.* Required if the rating system is not a 5-point scale. If worstRating is omitted, 1 is assumed. |