Review schema markup, and when it is worth adding

Review schema markup, in one sentence

Review schema markup is structured data added to a web page that tells a search engine, in machine readable form, who wrote a review, what it is about and what rating it gave.

The vocabulary is schema.org's Review type, a subclass of CreativeWork, whose main properties are author, itemReviewed, reviewRating, reviewBody and datePublished. It is normally written as JSON-LD inside a script tag rather than woven through the visible HTML.

A related type, AggregateRating, carries the summary: the average rating plus at least one of ratingCount or reviewCount. Both are what a search result needs in place before it can show stars at all.

Markup describes a page. It does not create eligibility by itself, and every value in it has to match something a visitor can actually read on that page.

The smallest correct Review block

This is the shape, property by property, in the order they are usually written. Every value here has to be visible on the page the block describes.

@type

Review

itemReviewed

the thing being rated, carrying a name

author

the reviewer, as a Person, name under 100 characters

reviewRating.ratingValue

4

reviewRating.bestRating

5

datePublished

2026-09-01

Six lines, of which 3 are required and 2 are recommended. Google's review snippet documentation lists itemReviewed, author and reviewRating.ratingValue among its required properties, and reviewRating.bestRating and datePublished among its recommended ones. The sixth line, @type, is the declaration that makes the block a Review at all. Google's full required list runs to 5 entries, adding itemReviewed.name and reviewRating itself, so a block with no author is not a weak block. It is an invalid one.

If you publish several individual reviews on one page, Google's guidance also asks for an aggregate rating of them alongside. A page of individual reviews with no summary is the second most common mistake after the missing author.

Why this reaches a local business at all

It usually arrives as a plugin that offers to put your Google reviews on your own website with stars in search results attached. That offer is where the trouble starts, and it is worth reading the documentation before installing anything.

Google's review snippet guidance is explicit. Where the entity being reviewed controls the reviews about itself, pages using LocalBusiness or any other Organization structured data are ineligible for the star review feature, and it names embedded third party widgets in the same breath. Reviews of your business, on your own website, marked up by you, are self serving by that definition.

So the honest use is narrower than the plugins imply. Marking up reviews of the products you sell, or of individual services, can be legitimate. Marking up reviews of yourself to put stars beside your homepage is the case the guidance names and excludes.

The misconception: markup puts stars on your search result

The plugin promises stars in Google. The markup goes in, the stars never appear, and the assumption is that something is misconfigured.

Structured data makes a page eligible for a rich result. It never guarantees one, and search engines withdraw and restrict these features regularly. For reviews of yourself on your own site the eligibility is not merely uncertain, it is documented as absent.

Marking up reviews that are not on the page, or that were invented, is a different problem again. Google's guidance says not to include fake or undisclosed incentivized reviews in your markup, and the FTC's 2024 rule reaches fabricated reviews wherever they are published.

Structured data questions from business owners

Answers for somebody deciding whether any of this is worth their afternoon.

Related terms if you are working on your own site

Every term in the glossary

• Local pack
• Review funnel
• Review syndication
• Sentiment analysis
• FTC review rules
• Review gating
• Review velocity
• Review response rate