Review/AggregateRating schema
What it checks
One review-markup audit: decide structurally whether the site shows reviews at all, then require the rating data a consumer can actually use — and, on product pages, require it on the Product.
| State | Result |
|---|---|
| no repeated review component, no star-rating widget and no review markup anywhere | na |
a usable rating (ratingValue + a non-zero reviewCount/ratingCount) or a non-empty review array — and, where product pages exist, at least one of them carries it on its Product |
pass |
| usable ratings exist, but no product page attaches one to its Product | warn, priority medium |
review content is shown and no usable rating exists ("review": [], "aggregateRating": {}, reviewCount: 0) |
fail, priority medium |
Applicability is ≥3 repeated review/testimonial components, a rendered star-rating widget, microdata review items, or review markup of any quality — never the word “review” in body text.
Why it matters
Google Search parses AggregateRating and Review markup on a supported host type, and renders a star review snippet in the search result. That snippet requires ratingValue, plus at least one of ratingCount or reviewCount. Applebot extracts AggregateRating for Siri and Spotlight Suggestions.
Evidence
- Google documents the consumer and the required fields. Review snippets are supported on Book, Course, Event, Local Business, Movie, Product, Recipe and Software App, plus further schema.org types: CreativeWorkSeason, CreativeWorkSeries, Episode, Game, MediaObject, MusicPlaylist, MusicRecording and Organization.
AggregateRatingrequiresratingValue, and “at least one ofratingCountorreviewCount” — developers.google.com/…/review-snippet (verified 2026-08-21) - Review snippet remains a live feature in Google’s structured data gallery, covering ratings for products, recipes, movies and other content types — developers.google.com/…/search-gallery (verified 2026-08-21)
- Apple’s web-markup guide lists AggregateRating among the schema.org types Applebot supports for Siri and Spotlight Suggestions — developer.apple.com/…/WebContent.html (verified 2026-08-21)
- Adoption: 72.2M AggregateRating entities extracted from the October 2024 Common Crawl — webdatacommons.org/…/stats.html (verified 2026-08-21)
Limits
The single strongest piece of counter-evidence cuts directly at how this audit is applied. Google: “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.” A first-party testimonial block marked up as Review or AggregateRating on a company’s own Organization or LocalBusiness page therefore has no documented consumer path. The proven mechanism holds for third-party-reviewed host entities such as Product, Recipe and Book, not for self-serving reviews — and self-serving reviews are exactly what the audit’s body-text trigger fires on.
Google separately disclaims any special schema requirement for AI Overviews and AI Mode — developers.google.com/…/ai-features (verified 2026-08-21) — and a matched difference-in-differences study of 1,885 pages adding JSON-LD found no AI-citation uplift on any platform — ahrefs.com/…/schema-ai-citations (verified 2026-08-21)
How it scores
Two vendor docs name a consumer and state what it does with the signal, and Google specifies the exact required properties.
Sources
- Review snippet structured data — Google Search Central, vendor-doc (verified 2026-08-21)
- Structured data markup that Google Search supports — Google Search Central, vendor-doc (verified 2026-08-21)
- App Search Programming Guide: Mark Up Web Content — Apple (Documentation Archive), vendor-doc (verified 2026-08-21)
- Web Data Commons Extraction Report — October 2024 Common Crawl Corpus — Web Data Commons (University of Mannheim), dataset (verified 2026-08-21)
- AI features and your website — Google Search Central, vendor-doc (verified 2026-08-21)
- We Tracked 1,885 Pages Adding Schema. AI Citations Barely Moved. — Ahrefs, study (verified 2026-08-21)
- Product snippet (structured data) — Google, vendor-doc (verified 2026-08-21)
- Merchant listing (Product) structured data — Google, vendor-doc (verified 2026-08-21)