Review schema

Telling a machine what the stars are attached to

A person reads a review block without thinking about it. Business name, then a score, then the number of people behind it, and one of them had a lot to say about parking. A crawler sees numbers sitting near text and has to work out which number belongs to what. Review schema labels the parts: the thing being reviewed, the score, the scale that score sits on, the author of a single review, and the count behind an average.

Two shapes are worth keeping apart. One marks up a single review, with its author and its rating. The other marks up an average across many reviews, which is what most service businesses have in mind when they ask about stars.

Everything in the markup has to be real and visible on the page it describes. The score has to match the reviews shown. The count has to match how many exist. Invented numbers are not a shortcut here. They are a policy violation, they put the rest of your markup at risk, and they misrepresent your business to the person deciding whether to call.

Why it matters for a local business

A star rating does a job no sentence can do. It answers "is this place any good" before anyone reads a word, in the moment a search result gets scanned. When an engine chooses to show a rating next to your listing, that changes how the result gets read. Whether it shows on any given day is the engine's call and not yours, and the rules around self serving reviews, meaning reviews you gather about yourself and publish on your own site, have been tightened more than once.

So the honest framing is a two parter. Mark up what is genuinely on your page, because it makes your reputation legible to machines that are increasingly summarizing you to strangers. Then do the review work where it counts regardless, on the profiles customers actually open and read, which is the ground covered by our reputation management work.

There is a version of this that goes wrong quietly. A theme or a plugin ships with rating markup baked into a template, and every page on the site inherits a perfect score nobody ever earned. Nothing malicious happened, and the exposure is exactly the same. The working rule: if rating markup exists anywhere on your site, somebody should be able to point at the reviews it refers to.

Most of that work is simply asking. A one tap review request tool built for a New Jersey glass and mirror shop exists for exactly that reason: the minute a job wraps up is the minute a happy customer will write something, and an hour later they are back at work and gone.

Terms that travel with this one

The visible outcome people usually mean when they ask for review markup is a star rating showing in results. The pace at which fresh reviews arrive, which matters more to platforms than a single good month, is review velocity.

And the practice of screening customers first so only the pleased ones get asked for a public review is review gating. It is against the rules on the major platforms, it gets sold anyway, and it is worth understanding well enough to recognize when somebody pitches it to you in nicer words.