When someone searches for your products on Google, your listing can show a star rating and the number of reviews right under the page title. These are called rich snippets. They make your products stand out in search results and give shoppers a reason to click.
Searchanise Product Reviews adds review stars to Google. It works automatically: you don’t need to edit your theme or add any code.
How it works
Google can’t “see” your reviews widget the way shoppers do. To show stars in search results, Google reads special hidden information on the product page that describes the product’s rating and reviews. This information is called structured data.
Searchanise Product Reviews adds this information to your product pages and keeps it up to date. It includes:
- The product’s average rating and number of ratings: the same numbers shoppers see in the reviews widget.
- Up to 10 latest reviews: the author’s name (as shown in the widget), the rating, the date, and the review text.
A few things to know:
- Only published reviews are used. Reviews waiting for moderation and rejected reviews are never shown to Google. To learn more, see Review moderation.
- Ratings without text count toward the average rating, but aren’t listed as separate reviews.
- Customer emails, your replies to reviews, and review photos are not included.
- Review data is added only to product pages that have at least one published review. Products without reviews, collection pages, and the home page don’t get it.
Turning it on
Review stars for Google are on by default. To check the setting:
- In your Shopify admin, open Searchanise Reviews > Settings > Where your reviews appear section.
- Make sure the Google search results toggle is on and its status is Active.
The Searchanise Product Reviews app embed must also be enabled in your theme. If you turn it off in Theme Editor > App Embeds, review data is removed from your product pages. For details, see Setting up review and rating widgets.
Keeping review data up to date
You don’t need to do anything when your reviews change. When you publish, unpublish, delete, or import reviews, the review data on your product pages updates automatically within about 15 minutes.
After that, Google needs to visit your product pages again to pick up the changes. This usually takes from a few days to a few weeks.
Checking that it works
You can check any product page with Google’s free tool:
- Open the Rich Results Test.
- Paste the link to a product page that has at least one published review.
- Click Test URL.
If everything is set up correctly, you’ll see Product snippets in the results.
You may see warnings about missing price or availability fields (offers). This is expected: Searchanise Product Reviews only adds review data. Prices are provided by your theme or Shopify.
When to turn it off
Some themes and SEO or review apps add their own rating data to product pages. If Google finds two different ratings on the same page, it may show the wrong one or none at all.
If your theme or another app already shows your ratings to Google, keep only one source:
- Turn off rating data in the theme or the other app; or
- Turn off the Google search results toggle in Searchanise Product Reviews.
When you turn off the toggle, review data is removed from your product pages, and Google stops showing stars from Searchanise Product Reviews.
Ratings on your storefront and in Searchanise Search
The Product pages and Product cards rows show your reviews widget on product pages and star ratings on product cards, which you can set up in the theme editor (see Setting up review and rating widgets). The Searchanise Search row shows whether your review ratings are indexed by Searchanise Search & Filter, so it can use them in your store search.
“Another app is also writing product rating data”
You’ll see this warning if another reviews app is saving its own ratings for your products. Because of this, the stars shown by your theme and in Searchanise Search may not match your reviews in Searchanise Product Reviews.
To fix it, remove the other reviews app. Review stars in Google show your Searchanise Product Reviews data, even while the warning is shown.
Why stars might not appear in Google
- Google hasn’t updated your pages yet. Give it some time after you publish reviews or change settings.
- The product has no published reviews. Stars can appear only for products with at least one published review.
- The app embed or the Google search results toggle is off. Check both settings as described above.
- Another app or your theme also adds ratings. Keep only one source of rating data.
- Google decides what to show. Even when everything is set up correctly, Google doesn’t guarantee that stars will appear for every product or every search.
