Reviews and schema in ecommerce: how to get them and mark them up.
Reviews help conversion and add trust signals. But they only work if they are real, visible on the page and marked up properly. Inventing them or over-marking them ends up backfiring.
Free, no card and no commitment. Reply within 48 hours.
Why they matter.
Reviews convert, add unique content to each product page and capture your customers’ real doubts in their own words. For search engines and AI, they are a signal that your product exists and has opinions.
That guarantees neither stars in Google nor citations in an AI: it improves your chances, nothing more.
How to get more real reviews.
- Send an email after delivery, once the customer has tried the product, with a direct link to leave a review.
- Make the request easy: a rating and one sentence.
- Reply to all of them, including the negative ones.
- Don’t ask for reviews only from people you know are happy, and don’t filter out the negative ones.
- Choose a review app or plugin that generates the correct markup and shows the opinions on the page itself.
How to mark them up with schema.
In the product page’s JSON-LD, inside the Product type, you can state the average rating (aggregateRating) and/or individual reviews (review). An illustrative example with made-up data:
- Only mark up reviews that are visible on the page.
- The rating and the number of reviews must match what you display.
- Reviews must be for the product on that page.
- Don’t invent ratings or use reviews written by you.
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "Product",
"name": "Example sneakers",
"aggregateRating": {
"@type": "AggregateRating",
"ratingValue": "4.6",
"reviewCount": "128"
}
}The rules that matter:
Product reviews versus store reviews.
Google has limited stars for reviews that a business publishes about itself on its own website (types such as Organization or LocalBusiness). Product reviews are the usual use case and can be eligible, although Google never guarantees it will show them.
How to check it works.
- Run the product page through Google’s Rich Results Test.
- Validate the JSON-LD with the Schema.org validator.
- Check the structured data reports in Search Console a few weeks later.
Frequently asked questions
Can I copy reviews from another platform onto my product page?
Only if they are real, about the same product and the source platform allows it. And only mark up the ones that are visible on the page.
Can I hide negative reviews?
You shouldn’t. You lose credibility, and marking up only the positive ones can breach the guidelines.
Will stars definitely show in Google?
No. Correct markup makes you eligible, but Google decides when to show them.
Do your product pages have reviews that Google doesn’t show?
In the audit we review the markup and the data quality of your product pages.
Get my free audit