September 2019 Review Rich Results Update
Confirmed UpdateSEPTEMBER 16, 2019
On September 16th, 2019, Google made a significant update to its practice of showing reviews within organic results. Per the update, Google no longer allows what it calls “self-serving reviews” to appear on the SERP. This means that sites can no longer use schema markup to place reviews shown on its own website within rich results on the SERP. This applies even to reviews placed on the brand’s site via a third-party integration.
As a result, our SERP Feature Tracker indicates a 5 point drop in the number of page one SERPs that contain a review within the organic results.
Google also indicated that the ‘name’ property must be indicated within the structured data. That is, you must name the product being reviewed.
Lastly, Google released a list of the schema formats that are eligible to produce a review within a rich result.
[You can use our Schema Markup Generator to easily create the code that produces rich results.]