Why it matters
Review snippets show an average star rating, and often the number of reviews, for products, local businesses, films, books and other things. Google's review snippet guide makes ratings of local businesses and organizations eligible only on sites that capture reviews about other businesses; reviews a business shows about itself are self-serving and not eligible.
How to meet it
Generate Review and AggregateRating markup only from the reviews visible on the page (DEV-SDA-02), for example on product pages, and remove LocalBusiness or Organization ratings about your own business from the site's markup, including those added by review widgets.
How to test it
The Rich Results Test shows review snippets only on templates with visible reviews, and a crawl finds no rating on the site's own Organization or LocalBusiness entity.
How Regensbot covers it
Decided from one URL.
An audit reads the response, the headers, the HTML, robots.txt, the sitemaps and the structured data, and the finding shows the evidence it saw.
Sources
Google documents02
- 01Review snippet (Review, AggregateRating) structured dataGoogle Search Central (opens in a new tab)
- 02General structured data guidelinesGoogle Search Central (opens in a new tab)
Claims in the knowledge base03
- D3-C337ConfirmedHow Search results are bornSaid on stage
- D3-C339ConfirmedHow Search results are bornSaid on stage
- D3-C340SourceHow Search results are bornGoogle's documentation
Claim IDs refer to the Search Central Live 2026 knowledge base. The knowledge base (opens in a new tab)
- Confirmed
- Google's documentation states the same thing.
- Source
- The claim is the cited document itself.