Customer Reviews, Disclosures, and When Star Markup Is Allowed

Customer reviews are useful when a real customer wrote them and a reader can see the relationship. The FTC's staff answers on endorsements say an endorsement has to be honest, and a material connection that a significant minority of readers would not expect has to be disclosed. Payment, a free product, a job, or a family tie are the examples they give [1]. Star markup is a separate rule, and it does not turn those quotes into a search feature.

What counts as a connection you have to disclose?

Something a reader would not already assume. The FTC says to disclose a payment, a free product, an employee relationship, or a relative [1]. A paid review that also mentions negatives still needs the disclosure [1]. Saying it on the first post and not on the next one is not enough. The disclosure goes on every post [1].

Are the Endorsement Guides themselves a statute?

The FTC says the Guides are not themselves the law. Practices that are inconsistent with them can still draw a case under Section 5, there is no safe harbor, and staff answers are not the final word [1]. This article is not legal advice. It is the public guidance, so you can see what the page actually says before a testimonial goes on the site.

Can the business mark up its own stars?

No. Google's review snippet guide says a LocalBusiness or Organization cannot use self-serving reviews for the star feature, and that includes an embedded widget of the business's own reviews [2]. The local business guide says the same thing from the other side: review and aggregateRating markup is for sites that collect reviews about other businesses [3]. A shop pasting its own five-star average into JSON-LD is the case those pages exclude.

What if the reviews are real and on the page?

The markup still has to match the visible text. Google says ratings have to come from users, not from the site's editors, the markup has to match the review people can read, and you should not mark up fake reviews or reviews that were incentivized without a disclosure [2]. Do not add up ratings from other websites and present them as your own [2]. An author name should be under 100 characters and should not be a promotional string [2].

How is the rating written?

The default scale is 1 to 5. Use a dot for a decimal, not a comma. You need at least a ratingCount or a reviewCount [2]. A product page that wants stars follows those review rules too. Google's variant documentation points aggregateRating and review back at the review snippet guidelines [4].

Does valid markup mean the stars will show?

No. Google says stars may show and are not guaranteed [2]. Product pages can be eligible for rating enhancements, and Google says those enhancements are shown at the discretion of each experience and can change [6]. Structured data can make a page eligible for a rich result. It is not a promise, and the large-site case studies in Google's introduction are Google's reports, not a forecast for a small shop [5]. A manual action is possible when markup abuses a feature [3].

Can you copy a rating from another site?

No. Google says not to aggregate reviews from other sites and mark them up as yours [2]. A screenshot of a star average from somewhere else is not the review text on your page, and the markup has to match text people can read on your page [2]. Link to the other site if you want. Do not paste its number into your script.

What should the quote on the page do, even with no stars?

Name the relationship when there is one, and do not invent a customer. The FTC's point is honesty plus a disclosure a reader will actually see [1]. A first name and a city can be enough when the person is a real customer who was not paid. A paragraph you wrote in the customer's voice is not a review. It is copy.

• Honest — the words are the customer's, not a rewrite that invents a result.
• Disclosed — payment, a free product, a job, or family is said on every post.
• On the page — markup matches the review people can read.
• Not self-rated — the business does not star itself.
• Not scraped — do not total up another site's ratings as your own.

Where do testimonials usually go wrong on a small site?

On the homepage of a store or a service business, in a row of unnamed quotes. A store and a fashion site both get asked for social proof. The proof has to be a real customer. Work samples are not reviews. The about page is not a place to invent a quote from a client who never wrote one.

What should you change this week?

Read each testimonial and ask who wrote it and whether they were paid, gifted, employed, or related. If the answer is yes, add the disclosure on that quote [1]. If the answer is that you wrote it, take it off. Then delete any aggregateRating that describes your own business [2]. Stars can wait until a real third-party review system is the thing on the page.