Google Search's reviews system and your website

The reviews system aims to better reward high quality reviews, which is content that provides insightful analysis and original research and is written by experts or enthusiasts who know the topic well. This page explains more about how the reviews system works, and what you can do to assess and improve your content.

How the reviews system works

The reviews system works to ensure that people see reviews that share in-depth research, rather than thin content that simply summarizes a bunch of products, services or other things. The reviews system is improved at a regular and ongoing pace.

The reviews system is designed to evaluate articles, blog posts, pages or similar first-party standalone content written with the purpose of providing a recommendation, giving an opinion, or providing analysis. It does not evaluate third-party reviews, such as those posted by users in the reviews section of a product or services page.

Reviews can be about a single thing, or head-to-head comparisons, or ranked-lists of recommendations. Reviews can be about any topic. There can be reviews of products such as laptops or winter jackets, pieces of media such as movies or video games, or services and businesses such as restaurants or fashion brands.

The reviews system primarily evaluates review content on a page-level basis. However, for sites that have a substantial amount of review content, any content within a site might be evaluated by the system. If you don't have a lot of reviews, a site-wide evaluation is not likely to happen.

Currently, this system applies to the following languages globally: English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Polish.

In the case of products, product structured data might help us better identify if something is a product review, but we don't solely depend on it.

What does this system mean for my site?

To learn more about how to create content that's successful with the reviews system, see our help page on how to write high quality reviews.

Content impacted by the reviews system may recover over time, if you've made improvements to your content. However, note that our automated assessment of review content is only one of many factors used in ranking content, so changes can happen at any time for various reasons.