Google Reminds Websites To Use One Review Target
Google has updated its review snippet documentation with an important clarification: every review or rating in your structured data must point to one specific target, not multiple entities. While this may seem like a minor documentation tweak, it addresses one of the most common schema mistakes that can lead to ambiguous or unusable review markup.
What Google Changed
In the updated documentation, Google explicitly states that a single review or aggregate rating should not be attached to multiple “things.”
In other words, one review = one target.
This update reinforces a basic but often overlooked principle: review markup should create a clear, unambiguous connection between the review and the product, service, business, or item it describes.
Where Review Target Confusion Happens
This problem typically appears on sites where structured data is generated automatically. Common scenarios include:
- Themes or plugins that apply the same star rating to both the product and the business entity.
- A single aggregate rating is reused across multiple entities on a page.
- Legacy JSON-LD markup that remains active when a newer schema is added.
- Page templates that mix Product, LocalBusiness, and Offer markup in ways that overlap review targets.
While the page may look fine visually, the structured data graph becomes messy, giving Google multiple possible targets for the same rating, a situation Google explicitly wants to avoid.
Why This Matters
If your site relies on review snippets to improve visibility in search results, following this guidance is essential.
Clean, direct relationships between reviews and their targets:
- Help Google interpret your structured data more reliably
- Reduce the chance of mixed or suppressed rich results
- Improve the consistency of your schema across templates and plugins
Ignoring this update could lead to confusing signals, making your reviews less likely to qualify for rich results.
What to Do Next
Google’s reminder makes it easy to add a quick new check to your technical audits:
- Test key URLs in the Rich Results Test.
- Review how many entities share the same review or rating.
- Remove any extra connections so that each review point to exactly one entity.
For most sites, the fix is straightforward cleaning up markup or adjusting how your CMS, plugins, or templates generate schema.
