How to Get Star Ratings in Google Search Results
For most local businesses the answer has nothing to do with markup. The stars you are picturing come from reviews on your business profile, which means this is a review collection question rather than a technical one.
The Stars You Are Thinking Of Probably Are Not These
Picture where you have seen star ratings for a business like yours. It was almost certainly a map result or a profile panel. Those stars come from reviews left on the profile with no markup involved anywhere.
What those stars are. Profile reviews.
Ratings left by customers on your business listing, gathered and displayed by the platform. They appear beside map results and in the panel. Nothing on your website contributes to them.
Why that answers most enquiries. It is the actual want.
Somebody asking how to get stars is usually looking at a competitor's map listing. The route to that is collecting reviews on your profile, which is a real task with a clear method and no technical component.
What that makes this question. Mostly not about markup.
For a plumber, a salon, a practice or a shop, the whole answer sits in our Google Business Profile material rather than here. That is worth knowing before reading another two thousand words.
Who does need the rest of this page. A narrower group.
Businesses selling products, else with genuine review collection on their own site, where markup is a real question. Everybody else can stop at this block.
How to tell which you are looking at. Where it sits.
Stars beside a map listing or a panel are profile ratings. Stars beneath an ordinary blue result, alongside a page title, are drawn from markup on that page. The two look similar and come from entirely separate places.
Why we open this way. It solves the problem honourably.
Answering the real need removes the reason anybody would consider the shortcut. That is a better outcome than a warning. It arrives first for that reason.
What Markup Can And Cannot Produce
Review markup can make a page eligible for a rating beside an ordinary result. It cannot guarantee one appears. It is also a different appearance from the profile stars block one describes.
What it can do. Establish eligibility.
A page with genuine reviews, correctly described, qualifies for a rating shown with its ordinary result. That is a real possibility and it is the extent of what implementation achieves.
What it cannot do. Produce the appearance.
Whether any given result is shown that way is decided at the point somebody searches. The same page can carry a rating for one search and appear plain for another.
Where it applies. Products, mainly.
Individual items with reviews from customers who bought them. That is where this enhancement is most commonly seen and where the markup is most clearly appropriate.
Where it does not. Service businesses without a review process.
A business with testimonials on a page and no collection process has nothing to describe. Block three covers why that ordering cannot be reversed.
What nobody can offer. A guarantee.
Anybody promising star ratings is promising something decided by somebody else. That is worth noticing in a proposal, whatever else it contains.
You Need Real Reviews First
The markup describes reviews rather than creating them. That makes collecting them the first task and the description the last. The order cannot be reversed however inconvenient that is.
Why the order is fixed. Description follows existence.
You cannot describe something that is not there. A page with no reviews has nothing for the markup to be about, which is a practical fact before it is an ethical one.
What collecting involves. Asking, systematically.
A process that invites feedback from customers as a matter of course rather than when somebody remembers. Attached to completing a job or delivering an order, so it happens without deciding.
Who to ask. Everybody.
Asking only the customers you expect to be pleased produces a score that misrepresents your customers. It also produces a suspiciously uniform set, which readers discount.
What showing involves. The unflattering ones too.
Reviews visible on the page, including the poor ones. A mixed set is more believable than a perfect one. It is also what actually happened.
Then the markup. Describing what is there.
At that point the description restates something a reader can verify by scrolling. That is the whole test. Review markup sets out the four conditions in full.
The Thing We Will Not Do
We do not implement invented ratings, ratings aggregated from elsewhere, nor review markup on pages with no reviews. That holds whatever a client asks. It is a fixed position rather than a preference.
Invented ratings. The obvious one.
A figure asserted without real people having given it. Nobody defends this in the abstract and it is requested more often than that suggests.
Aggregated from elsewhere. The one asked in good faith.
Restating a score collected on another platform as your own site's data. Usually proposed by somebody who has genuine reviews and reasonably thinks they can show them, which the review page addresses properly.
Markup on pages with no reviews. The site-wide version.
Applying an overall rating across every page including ones nobody has reviewed. Common on stores, though false even where every underlying review is real.
Why we state it rather than declining quietly. Recognition.
A business that has been offered fabricated ratings by somebody else will recognise immediately what it is being told here. That recognition is worth more to us than any capability claim.
Why a client asks in the first place. Somebody else offered.
Nearly every request we get for this arrives because a previous supplier presented it as routine. The client is not proposing something improper, they are repeating what they were told was normal, which is why the conversation is worth having properly.
What we do instead. Say what will work.
Where a client wants stars, we explain where theirs would come from and what collecting reviews involves. That is a longer conversation and it ends somewhere real.
What Happens To Sites That Do
The enhancement gets removed, else in more serious cases a manual action follows. Both are set out in published policy rather than being anybody's guesswork. Neither is described here as unlikely.
The first outcome. Ratings stop appearing.
The enhancement is withdrawn for that site. Nothing else changes, no notification necessarily explains why, then the thing the markup existed for is simply gone.
The second. A penalty applied by a person.
Where the problem is judged serious, a manual action can be taken against the site. That affects how the site is treated generally rather than only its enhancements.
Why the second is worse than it sounds. Removal does not undo it.
Taking the markup out restores nothing by itself. Somebody has to correct the site and submit it for reconsideration, which takes time nobody budgeted for.
How these things get noticed. Frequently reported.
A business showing ratings with no visible reviews is conspicuous to competitors in the same market. Reporting it costs them nothing at all.
Why we will not soften this. Softening invites a gamble.
Describing the risk as remote would encourage somebody to weigh odds. Our risky practices material covers how these actions work across the board.
Getting FAQs Showing
People ask about expanded FAQ results in the same breath as star ratings. That appearance no longer exists for any site, which makes it a shorter answer than it used to be.
The first change. August 2023.
Google announced on its Search Central blog that FAQ rich results would only be shown for well-known, authoritative government and health websites. Every other site lost the appearance at that point.
The second. May 2026.
The feature stopped appearing entirely, including for the sites that had remained eligible. Google's documentation now states that FAQ rich results are no longer appearing in Search.
What is being removed alongside it. The reporting.
That notice states the search appearance, the rich result report and Rich Results Test support are dropped in June 2026, with Search Console API support removed in August 2026.
What that means for a proposal. Nobody can deliver it.
Work offered to obtain expanded FAQ appearances is work to obtain something that does not happen. Guidance repeating the earlier restriction as current is describing a superseded policy.
Whether to remove existing markup. No need.
Google has said unused structured data causes no problems for Search. FAQ markup covers what remains worth doing and why.
Which Leaves You With The Real Answer
Collect genuine reviews and show them. Publish genuine questions and answer them. The enhancements follow where they still exist. The work is worth doing where they do not.
On reviews. The profile first.
For most businesses, reviews on the profile are where the stars come from and where customers look. That is the highest return available and it needs no implementation.
On questions. Write them because they are asked.
A genuine questions section serves readers whether or not anything displays it. Ours come from client calls and enquiry emails, which is why several are awkwardly phrased.
Why this survives the enhancements. It is not contingent.
Real reviews shown on a page help somebody decide, with or without stars in a result. Answered questions help a reader, with or without an expanded appearance.
What that produces. A page worth arriving at.
Both exercises improve the page for the person reading it, which is the only outcome no search engine can withdraw.
What it costs to do properly. Less than expected.
A review request attached to finishing a job and a questions section drawn from your own inbox are both small pieces of work. The expensive part is the process nobody set up rather than anything technical.
The version to avoid. Doing it for the display.
Reviews collected to obtain stars and questions bolted on to obtain a box are both liable to disappoint. Doing them for the reader does not.
Do Not Build A Strategy On An Enhancement
These appear and disappear. A business dependent on one is exposed to a decision it has no part in. That is the most durable advice on this page.
What has already gone. Two of the popular ones.
Expanded question results were restricted and then withdrawn entirely. Step-by-step results were deprecated on every device. Both were widely implemented and widely recommended first.
What exposure looks like. A single point of failure.
A business whose enquiries depended on one enhancement has its visibility decided elsewhere. When the feature goes, nothing about the site changed and the outcome did.
What is not withdrawable. Accuracy.
Describing your pages correctly cannot be taken away, because the benefit is being understood rather than being decorated. That is the argument the concept page makes for the whole subject.
How to read any proposal. Check what it rests on.
Work justified by a specific appearance is work resting on somebody else's roadmap. Work justified by accuracy holds whatever changes.
How we keep this current. A named owner.
This page and the others describing display behaviour are reviewed quarterly by Andrew Odgers, Managing Director. Google SERP features explained covers the pattern. The full series is on the schema and structured data guide.
Ask where the
ratings would
come from.
If the answer is vague, you are being offered invented ratings, scores taken from another platform, else markup on pages nobody has reviewed. We will not implement any of those, whatever is asked. We will tell you where your stars would actually come from.
What we will and will not do:
Anybody promising star ratings is promising something decided by somebody else.
Every guide.
One practice.
What structured data is, which types apply to your business, how to test it, where the results features come from and what to do when nothing appears.
