
A critic review is a snippet from a longer review article that a single editor has created, curated, or compiled for a publisher. Critic reviews appear in Search results with a snippet from the critic, the critic's name and the publisher icon, helping your readers to easily find the reviews and navigate to your website to read the complete reviews. You can supply critic reviews for the following content types:
How to add structured data
Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content. If you're new to structured data, you can learn more about how structured data works.
Here's an overview of how to build, test, and release structured data. For a step-by-step guide on how to add structured data to a web page, check out the structured data codelab.
- Add the required properties. For information about where to put structured data on the page, watch JSON-LD structured data: Where to insert on the page.
- Follow the guidelines.
- Validate your code using the Rich Results Test.
- Deploy a few pages that include your structured data and use the URL Inspection tool to test how Google sees the page. Be sure that your page is
accessible to Google and not blocked by a robots.txt file, the
noindex
tag, or login requirements. If the page looks okay, you can ask Google to recrawl your URLs. - To keep Google informed of future changes, we recommend that you submit a sitemap. You can automate this with the Search Console Sitemap API.
Examples
You can embed critic reviews inside LocalBusiness
. This is useful for sites that
provide booking services for many businesses or for business listing aggregators. Here's an
example of an embedded review of a business in JSON-LD:
<html> <head> <title>Dave's Steak House</title> <script type="application/ld+json"> { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Restaurant", "@id": "http://davessteakhouse.example.com", "name": "Dave's Steak House", "image": "http://davessteakhouse.example.com/logo.jpg", "sameAs": "http://davessteakhouse.example.com", "servesCuisine": "Steak House", "priceRange": "$$$", "address": { "@type": "PostalAddress", "streetAddress": "148 W 51st St", "addressLocality": "New York", "addressRegion": "NY", "postalCode": "10019", "addressCountry": "US" }, "telephone": "+12122459600", "geo": { "@type": "GeoCoordinates", "latitude": 40.761293, "longitude": -73.982294 }, "aggregateRating": { "@type": "AggregateRating", "ratingValue": "88", "bestRating": "100", "worstRating": "1", "ratingCount": "20" }, "review": { "@type": "Review", "url": "http://www.localreviews.com/restaurants/1/2/3/daves-steak-house.html", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Lisa Kennedy", "sameAs": "https://plus.google.com/114108465800532712602" }, "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Denver Post", "sameAs": "http://www.denverpost.com" }, "datePublished": "2014-03-13T20:00", "description": "Great old fashioned steaks but the salads are sub par.", "inLanguage": "en", "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "worstRating": 1, "bestRating": 4, "ratingValue": 3.5 } } } </script> </head> <body> </body> </html>
You can provide standalone critic review objects, which are suitable for sites that perform no direct function for the business being reviewed, such as news sites. Here's an example of a standalone review of a business in JSON-LD:
<html> <head> <title>Dave's Steak House</title> <script type="application/ld+json"> { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Restaurant", "@id": "http://davessteakhouse.example.com", "name": "Dave's Steak House", "image": "http://davessteakhouse.example.com/logo.jpg", "sameAs": "http://davessteakhouse.example.com", "servesCuisine": "Steak House", "priceRange": "$$$", "address": { "@type": "PostalAddress", "streetAddress": "148 W 51st St", "addressLocality": "New York", "addressRegion": "NY", "postalCode": "10019", "addressCountry": "US" }, "telephone": "+12122459600", "geo": { "@type": "GeoCoordinates", "latitude": 40.761293, "longitude": -73.982294 }, "aggregateRating": { "@type": "AggregateRating", "ratingValue": "88", "bestRating": "100", "worstRating": "1", "ratingCount": "20" }, "review": { "@type": "Review", "url": "http://www.localreviews.com/restaurants/1/2/3/daves-steak-house.html", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Lisa Kennedy", "sameAs": "https://plus.google.com/114108465800532712602" }, "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Denver Post", "sameAs": "http://www.denverpost.com" }, "datePublished": "2014-03-13T20:00", "description": "Great old fashioned steaks but the salads are sub par.", "inLanguage": "en", "reviewRating": { "@type": "Rating", "worstRating": 1, "bestRating": 4, "ratingValue": 3.5 } } } </script> </head> <body> </body> </html>
Guidelines
Your content must follow these guidelines to be eligible to appear as a rich result.
Technical guidelines
- Refer clearly to a specific product or service by nesting the review within the markup of
another schema.org type, such as schema.org/Book or
schema.org/LocalBusiness, or by using a
schema.org type as a value for the
itemReviewed
property. - Make sure the reviews and ratings you mark up are readily available to users from the marked-up page. It should be immediately obvious to users that the page has review content.
- Provide review information about a specific item, not about a category or a list of
items.
Recommended: Hesperia Madrid Hotel
Not recommended: Top 10 hotels in Madrid
Content guidelines
- Authoritative human editor(s) must create, curate, or compile content for critic reviews.
- The snippet can't exceed 200 characters.
- The snippet must clearly indicate an opinion about the review subject. It should not merely define the subject (for example, ""Gravity" is a film by Alfonso Cuarón") or a plot synopsis (for example, "Dr. Ryan Stone is an engineer on her first space mission").
- Critic reviews can't be template sentences built from data or automated metrics.
- Don't include critic reviews that are duplicated or similar across many businesses.
- Only include critic reviews that have been directly produced by your site, not reviews from third-party sites or syndicated reviews.
- Use non-smart double quotation marks (") to denote titles (for example, ""Gravity" is the best movie.")
- The snippet must make sense on its own and should not be confusing to someone who isn't reading the whole article.
- The snippet must be an exact excerpt from the long-form body of the review. It should not be the review headline, a question or a teaser.
- The snippet must be complete (not cut off, truncated, or ending in ellipses) and well-formed (having correct punctuation and grammar) thought.
- Avoid profanity and vulgar language. Reviews should be appropriate for a broad and diverse audience. Consequently, reviews containing vulgar or profane language may be ineligible for use.
- Don't add critic review structured data for adult-related products or services.
- If the critic review is for a local business, you must follow these additional guidelines:
- Snippets must not be written by the business or content provider, and may not be provided by the business or content provider unless they are genuine, independent, and unpaid editorial reviews.
- Critic reviews must allow for customers to express both positive and negative sentiments. They may not be vetted by the business or restricted by the content provider based on the positive or negative sentiment of the review before submission to Google.
- Critic reviews for multiple-location businesses such as retail chains or franchises can only be submitted for the specific business location for which they were written. In other words, critic reviews for multiple-location businesses can't be syndicated or applied to all business locations of the same company.
- There can't be any commercial agreements (paid or otherwise) to provide critic reviews between the content provider and the reviewed business.
Structured data type definitions
You must include the following required properties for your content to be eligible for display as a rich result. You can also include the following recommended properties to add more information about your content, which could provide a better user experience.
Review
The full definition of Review
is available at
schema.org/Review.
Required properties | |
---|---|
datePublished
|
Date of the review's first publication, in ISO 8601 date format. |
description
|
A snippet from the body of the actual review that captures the author's opinion about the review subject. The snippet must follow our content guidelines. |
itemReviewed
|
The item that is being reviewed. |
itemReviewed.address |
The address of the specific business location. The |
itemReviewed.address.addressCountry
|
The 2-letter ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code. The
|
itemReviewed.address.addressLocality |
The city of the local business (if applicable). The
|
itemReviewed.address.addressRegion |
The state or province of the local business (if applicable). The
|
itemReviewed.address.postalCode
|
The postal or zip code of the local business (if applicable). The
|
itemReviewed.address.streetAddress |
The street number, street name, and unit number of the local business (if applicable).
The |
itemReviewed.author
|
The annotation for the author of the book. The |
itemReviewed.author.name
|
The name of author of the book. The |
itemReviewed.isbn
|
The ISBN of the book. In cases where no ISBN exists, use
|
itemReviewed.name
|
The name of the item that is the subject of the review. It can be the name of the book, movie, or local business. |
itemReviewed.sameAs
|
The URL of a page that unambiguously identifies the item that is the subject of the review. Google strongly prefers the following URLs based on the subject of the review:
For books only, the |
publisher
|
Annotation for the publisher of the review. |
publisher.name
|
Name of the publisher of the review. For example, "The New York Times". |
Recommended properties | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
aggregateRating
|
The average score assigned to the item being reviewed. This typically applies to user ratings rather than professional critic ratings. |
||||
aggregateRating.bestRating
|
The highest value allowed in the reviewer's rating system. If this property is omitted, 5 is assumed. Letter grades are allowed (for example, "A"). |
||||
aggregateRating.ratingCount
|
The number of ratings given to the reviewed item. |
||||
aggregateRating.ratingValue
|
The average rating given to the reviewed item. Letter grades are allowed (for example, "B+"). |
||||
aggregateRating.worstRating
|
The lowest value allowed in the reviewer's rating system. If this property is omitted, 1 is assumed. Letter grades are allowed (for example, "C-"). |
||||
author
|
The author of the review. The reviewer's name must be a valid name. For example, "50% off until Saturday" is not a valid name for a reviewer. |
||||
author.name
|
Name of the author of the review. Provide the full name of the author. The value should be capitalized correctly. Names comprised of entirely uppercase or lowercase letters are edited such that the first letter of every word is capitalized. |
||||
author.sameAs
|
URL of a page that unambiguously identifies the author (for example, the author's official website, a profile page, a Wikipedia article). |
||||
inLanguage
|
The BCP-47 language code of the review description (for example, "ja" is Japanese).
We strongly recommended |
||||
itemReviewed.actor
|
The annotation(s) for main cast of the movie. The |
||||
itemReviewed.actor.name
|
The name of the actor. The |
||||
itemReviewed.actor.sameAs
|
The URL of a page that unambiguously identifies the actor. Google strongly prefers the
actor's IMDB or Wikipedia page. The |
||||
itemReviewed.datePublished
|
The original publication date of the book or the original theatrical or direct-to-video
release date of the movie, in
ISO 8601 format.
The |
||||
itemReviewed.director
|
The annotation for the director of the movie. The
|
||||
itemReviewed.director.name
|
The name of the director. The |
||||
itemReviewed.director.sameAs
|
The URL of a page that unambiguously identifies the director. Google strongly prefers
URLs to director's IMDB or Wikipedia page. The |
||||
itemReviewed.geo
|
The geographic coordinates of the business. The |
||||
itemReviewed.geo.latitude |
The latitude of the business location. The precision should be at least 5 decimal
places. The |
||||
itemReviewed.geo.longitude
|
The longitude of the business location. The precision should be at least 5 decimal
places. The |
||||
itemReviewed.telephone
|
The public phone number of the business that's normally used by customers, including
the country code. The |
||||
publisher.sameAs
|
The URL of the publisher's official website or Wikipedia page. |
||||
reviewRating |
Must be one of the following:
|
||||
reviewRating.bestRating
|
The highest value allowed in this rating system. This property is required if the
rating system is not on a 5-point scale. If |
||||
reviewRating.ratingValue
|
The rating given to the reviewed item. Letter grades are allowed. For example, "B+". |
||||
reviewRating.worstRating
|
The lowest value allowed in this rating system. The |
||||
URL
|
URL of the web page that contains the full text of the review. The webpage indicated by this property must contain a full-length review that is longer than 300 words. Other use cases:
|
Monitor rich results with Search Console
Search Console is a tool that helps you monitor how your pages perform in Google Search. You don't have to sign up for Search Console to be included in Google Search results, but it can help you understand and improve how Google sees your site. We recommend checking Search Console in the following cases:
- After deploying structured data for the first time
- After releasing new templates or updating your code
- Analyzing traffic periodically
After deploying structured data for the first time
After Google has indexed your pages, look for issues using the relevant Rich result status report. Ideally you should see an increase of valid pages, and no increase in errors or warnings. If you find issues in your structured data:
- Fix the errors.
- Inspect a live URL to check if the issue persists.
- Request validation using the status report.
After releasing new templates or updating your code
When you make significant changes to your website, monitor for increases in structured data errors and warnings.- If you see an increase in errors, perhaps you rolled out a new template that doesn't work, or your site interacts with the existing template in a new and bad way.
- If you see a decrease in valid items (not matched by an increase in errors), perhaps you are no longer embedding structured data in your pages. Use the URL Inspection tool to learn what is causing the issue.
Analyzing traffic periodically
Analyze your Google Search traffic using the Performance Report. The data will show you how often your page appears as a rich result in Search, how often users click on it and what is the average position you appear on search results. You can also automatically pull these results with the Search Console API.Troubleshooting
If you're having trouble implementing structured data, here are some resources that may help you.
- You might have an error in your structured data. Check the list of structured data errors.
- Troubleshoot missing rich results / drop in total rich results.
- For general questions about crawling and indexing, check the Google Search crawling and indexing FAQ.
- Ask a question in the Google Search Central office hours.
- Post a question in the Google Search Central forum.