Google Clarifies Review Snippet Guidance: Use a Single Review Target
Google updated its review snippet documentation to clarify that each review or rating must link to one clear target. The change highlights common schema errors that create ambiguous relationships and offers guidance for improving structured data accuracy.
Google has updated its review snippet documentation to emphasize a key best practice for structured data: each review or aggregate rating must point to one clear target. The revision is minor, but it addresses a widespread implementation issue that often leads to ambiguous review markup.
What Google Changed
In its updated guidance, Google advises against assigning multiple entities as the target of the same review or rating. Review snippets should reference only one item—such as a product, business, or service—to ensure that Google can accurately understand and display the information.
The clarification reflects challenges Google has observed in real-world implementations, particularly on sites that rely heavily on plugins or automatically generated structured data.
Where Conflicts Typically Occur
Review target ambiguity frequently arises when structured data is created or layered automatically. Common scenarios include:
- A single star rating applied to both a product entity and a business entity.
- One aggregate rating reused across multiple entities on a page.
- Older JSON-LD templates remaining active after updated markup is introduced.
These issues are not always visible to site owners, but within the structured data graph, they create multiple competing relationships that make it difficult for Google to determine which item the review actually applies to.
Why the Clarification Matters
Websites that rely on review snippets—especially ecommerce and local business sites—depend on accurate structured data markup to qualify for rich results. By reinforcing the need for a single review target, Google is signaling that clearer schema relationships may improve interpretation and reduce the risk of conflicting signals.
What Website Owners Should Do
Google’s update provides a straightforward recommendation for audits and technical reviews:
- Test key pages with the Rich Results Test.
- Look for cases where multiple entities share the same review or rating.
- Remove redundant or conflicting connections so each review corresponds to one defined target.
Ensuring that reviews have a single, unambiguous relationship improves structured data quality and may help maintain eligibility for review-rich results going forward.
