Google has recently updated its review snippet documentation to clarify how to define the target for reviews and aggregate ratings in structured data. This small but important change addresses a common issue in schema markup that can make it difficult for Google to accurately understand reviews and affect rich results visibility.
What’s New in the Documentation
The updated guidelines from Google emphasize that each review or rating should be associated with just one target entity. It’s crucial to avoid attaching the same review or rating to multiple different entities such as a product and a business or a product and a service. This ensures that there is a clear, singular relationship between the review and what it describes, allowing Google to better interpret and display the data in search results.
Where Review Targets Often Get Confused
This type of confusion typically occurs when structured data is generated automatically. Common issues include:
- Assigning the same star rating to both a product entity and a business entity.
- Reusing one aggregate rating across multiple entities or items on the same page.
- Failing to update old JSON-LD templates when adding new schema, causing overlaps in the data.
While these issues might not be visible to users on the page, they can create multiple paths in the structured data graph, leading to confusion about the true target of the review.
Why This Update Matters
This clarification is essential for websites that rely on review snippets for better search visibility. By ensuring that each review points to one clear target, Google can better interpret the data and reduce conflicting signals that might prevent rich results from being shown. This is particularly important for businesses that depend on structured data to enhance search results with stars, ratings, and other review features.
What to Do Next
To comply with Google’s updated guidelines, here are some simple steps to follow in your audits:
- Use the Rich Results Test tool on a few key pages of your site.
- Check how many entities are sharing the same review or rating.
- Remove any extra connections so that each review points to just one entity.
In most cases, fixing this issue involves cleaning up schema markup by eliminating unnecessary connections and ensuring that each review is linked to a single, clear target.
