Fixing aggregateRating Schema Errors

What aggregateRating is, and where Google shows stars

AggregateRating is a schema.org type that summarises many individual ratings into one: the average (ratingValue), how many ratings or reviews it is based on (ratingCount or reviewCount), and the scale (bestRating and worstRating). Google uses it to show a review snippet: the stars, the score and the count under a search result.

An aggregateRating is never shown on its own. It always belongs to something being rated, and Google only shows stars when that something is one of the types it supports for review snippets:

• Product: physical and digital products, including product variants.
• Recipe, Book, Movie and CreativeWorkSeason or CreativeWorkSeries.
• Course and Event.
• SoftwareApplication, for apps and software.
• LocalBusiness and Organization, but only when the ratings are collected about another business, never about your own (see the self-serving section below).

A rating on any other type, such as a WebPage, an Article or a Service with no supported parent, may be valid schema.org, but it will never produce stars, and the Rich Results Test reports it as an invalid parent type.

The fields aggregateRating needs

A correct block you can copy: nested in a Product

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Product",
  "name": "Oak chopping board, large",
  "image": "https://example.com/images/oak-board.jpg",
  "brand": { "@type": "Brand", "name": "Northwood" },
  "offers": {
    "@type": "Offer",
    "price": "34.00",
    "priceCurrency": "GBP",
    "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock"
  },
  "aggregateRating": {
    "@type": "AggregateRating",
    "ratingValue": "4.6",
    "reviewCount": "127",
    "bestRating": "5",
    "worstRating": "1"
  }
}
</script>

The same rating as a separate node

If your markup keeps the rating apart from the product, for example in an @graph, it must say what it rates with itemReviewed:

{
  "@type": "AggregateRating",
  "itemReviewed": { "@id": "https://example.com/oak-board#product" },
  "ratingValue": "4.6",
  "reviewCount": "127"
}

The errors you will see, and what each one means

These are the messages the Rich Results Test, the Search Console Review snippets report, the Schema Markup Validator and the Schema Debugger give for ratings, with the cause behind each one.

Getting the scale right

Google shows stars on a five-point scale. If your ratings use another scale, tell Google the scale and it converts the score. Get the scale wrong and the stars are wrong, or the rating is rejected as out of range.

Rounding and freshness

Round the average to one decimal place, and keep the value and count in step with the ratings shown on the page. If the page says 4.6 from 127 reviews and the markup says 4.8 from 90, the markup is out of date, and a mismatch between markup and page is treated as misleading.

Self-serving, third-party and hidden ratings

Most ratings that pass every test but never show stars fail on policy, not syntax. The testing tools cannot see these problems, so they need checking by hand.

Self-serving reviews

Since 2019 Google does not show review snippets for a LocalBusiness or Organization when the business collects and marks up ratings about itself on its own site. A plumber marking up its own five-star average on its home page, or a company adding an aggregateRating to its Organization node, falls into this rule. The markup is ignored for stars, and heavy use can be treated as spam.

Ratings of your products, on your own product pages, are fine. The rule is about a business rating itself.

Ratings from other sites

Ratings must be collected on your own site. Copying a Trustpilot, Google or Facebook average into your markup, or marking up a third-party review widget, breaks the review snippet rules. Show the widget if you like, but do not put its numbers in your structured data.

Hidden or invented ratings

• The rating in the markup must be visible on the same page, with the score and the count.
• Readers must be able to leave a rating, or see the reviews it was built from.
• Ratings written by the site owner, paid for, or made up to fill a template are fake reviews under Google's spam policies and can bring a manual action that removes stars from the whole site.
• A fixed rating hard-coded into a theme, the same 4.9 on every page, is the most common version of this we find in audits.

Fixing JSON that cannot be read

A rating inside an unparsable block is lost along with everything else in that block, including the Product or Recipe it belongs to. The usual faults are the same four as in every JSON-LD block.

• A trailing comma after the last field, often left when worstRating is deleted: "bestRating": "5", }.
• Curly quotes around names or values, from text pasted out of a word processor.
• An unescaped quote in a product or review name, such as a size in inches: 12" pan must be written 12\" pan.
• A raw line break inside a review body.

A fifth problem is special to ratings: templates that print the value without quotes, such as "ratingValue": ,, when a product has no ratings yet. The value is empty and the JSON is broken. The template must leave the whole aggregateRating out when the count is zero.

{% if review_count > 0 %}
  "aggregateRating": {
    "@type": "AggregateRating",
    "ratingValue": "{{ rating_average | round: 1 }}",
    "reviewCount": "{{ review_count }}"
  },
{% endif %}

The fix, step by step

Stopping it from coming back

• One rating source. Let the review system you actually use output the rating, and switch off rating output in the theme and in any second plugin.
• Build it from live data. The markup should read the same average and count as the visible stars, so they cannot drift apart.
• No ratings, no markup. Make the template skip aggregateRating when the count is zero.
• Never rate yourself. Keep ratings off your own Organization and LocalBusiness nodes, on every page.
• Test after updates. Review plugins change their markup often. Re-run the Schema Debugger on one product page after each update.