Google review stars: where they show and who decides

The three kinds of Google review stars

Sources: Google: tips to get more reviews, review snippet, store ratings.

Stars on your Google Business Profile

These are the stars most people mean. Google says reviews "show next to your Business Profile in Maps and Search" (Google), and explains the score on its review scores page (Google):

• Scale: "All scores are rated on a scale from 1 to 5 stars, with 5 as the highest rating."
• Calculation: "The review score is the average of all ratings published on Google for that place or business."
• Timing: "After someone leaves a new review, it may take up to 2 weeks to get an updated review score."
• Other sites: "In some cases, Business Profiles may show customer reviews from other local review sites."

You cannot set this rating. You can earn more reviews by asking every customer, which our guide on how to get more Google reviews covers, and you can reply to the reviews you get.

Stars beside your pages in search results

A review snippet is "a short excerpt of a review or a rating from a review website", and "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" (Google).

Three rules decide most cases:

• The page type must be eligible. Product, SoftwareApplication, Course, Book, Recipe and a few other types qualify. Our review schema guide has the full list.
• Not reviews of yourself on your own site. Google says: "If the entity that's being reviewed controls the reviews about itself, their pages that use LocalBusiness or any other type of Organization structured data are ineligible for star review feature." Its example includes reviews placed "through an embedded third-party widget".
• The reviews must be real and visible. "Make sure the review content you mark up are readily available to users from the marked-up page", and "Don't include fake or undisclosed incentivized reviews".

So a shop's product pages and a software company's app page can be eligible. A home page showing reviews of the company itself is not.

Stars in Google Shopping and ads

Store ratings rate the experience of buying from a shop, and product ratings rate individual items. Both come through Merchant Center, not from your Business Profile. Google says "A rating of 3.5 or above is required to display a store rating on ads" (Google). The thresholds and routes are in our Google seller ratings guide.

Who decides whether stars show

Google does, every time. Its structured data policies say "Using structured data enables a feature to be present, it does not guarantee that it will be present", and "Google does not guarantee that your structured data will show up in search results" (Google).

The same page lists reasons markup may not appear: the structured data "is not representative of the main content of the page, or is potentially misleading"; it "is incorrect in a way that the Rich Results Test was not able to catch"; "The content referred to by the structured data is hidden from the user"; or a quality guideline was broken. A manual action means "a page loses eligibility for appearance as a rich result".

Why your Google review stars are not showing

Work through this list:

• Business Profile: the new review was left less than 2 weeks ago, or there are no published reviews yet.
• Wrong page type: the page is marked up as Organization or LocalBusiness and the reviews are about you.
• Reviews not on the page: the markup describes reviews a visitor cannot see there.
• Markup errors: test the page in Google's Rich Results Test and look at the rendered HTML.
• A guideline problem: misleading, hidden or incentivised content, or a manual action in Search Console.
• Shopping and ads: too few eligible reviews, or a store rating below 3.5 for ads.
• Nothing wrong: Google can still choose not to show stars for a valid page.

Can you show Google review stars on your website?

You can show your Google reviews and rating on your site with a widget, and many widget providers do this. What it does not do is earn stars in search: reviews of your business shown on your own site are self-serving under Google's rule, and Google names "Google Business reviews" widgets in its example (Google). Google's own route to a store rating badge on your site is Google Customer Reviews, covered in our Google seller ratings guide. Our review widget guide covers choosing and adding a widget.

How to earn stars honestly

1. 1
   Collect real reviews from every customer, with no reward and no filter for good ratings.
2. 2
   Put product reviews on product pages, where the page describes the thing being reviewed.
3. 3
   Mark them up with an eligible type, such as Product or SoftwareApplication, and keep the reviews visible on the page.
4. 4
   Test the page in the Rich Results Test and fix every error.
5. 5
   Leave reviews of your company to your profiles, on Google and on review sites, rather than marking them up on your own pages.
6. 6
   Wait and check. Google decides, and it can take time.

Where GoldStarred fits

GoldStarred does not control Google's stars, and nobody else does either. On Growth, at $17 a month, each of up to 25 products, apps or courses gets its own widget and its own review page; for products and apps that page carries the Google markup that makes it eligible for star ratings in search results. Pro, at $37 a month, makes products unlimited. Reviews of your business itself go on your free public GoldStarred profile, which Google can list once it holds 3 published reviews. Plans are monthly; prices exclude VAT and sales tax.

We make GoldStarred, so weigh this section with that in mind; see GoldStarred plans.