READS The elusive five-star review used to be something you could only flaunt in a rotating reviews section on your website. But today, Google has pulled these stars out of the shadows and features them front and center across branded SERPs and beyond. Star ratings can help businesses earn trust from potential customers, improve local search rankings, and boost conversions. Past studies have found that over 99.9% of customers read reviews when shopping online, with 96% specifically seeking out negative reviews to better assess a business. So it is inarguable that customer reviews and ratings like Google star ratings are critical to building trust and winning business. This is your guide to how they work. Stars And SERPs: What Is The Google Star Rating? A Google star rating is a consumer-powered grading system that lets other consumers know how good a business is based on a score of one to five stars. These star ratings can appear across maps and different Google search results properties like standard blue link search listings, ads, rich results like recipe cards, local pack results, third-party review sites, and on-app store results. How Does The Google Star Rating Work? When a person searches Google, they will see star ratings in the results. Google uses an algorithm and an average to determine how many stars are displayed on different review properties. Google explains that the star score system operates based on an average of all review ratings for that business that have been published on Google. It’s important to note that this average is not calculated in real-time and can take up to two weeks to update after a new review is created. When users leave a review, they are asked to rate a business based on specific aspects of their customer experience, as well as the type of business being reviewed and the services they’ve included. For example, “plumbers may get “Install faucet” or “Repair toilet” as services to add,” and Google also allows businesses to add custom services that aren’t listed. When customers are prompted to give feedback, they can give positive or critical feedback, or they can choose not to select a specific aspect to review, in which case this feedback aspect is considered unavailable. This combination of feedback is what Google uses to determine a business’s average score by “dividing the number of positive ratings by the total number of ratings (except the ones where the aspect was not rated).” Google star ratings do have some exceptions in how they function. For example, the UK and EU have certain restrictions that don’t apply to other regions, following recent scrutiny by the EU Consumer Protection Cooperation and the UK Competitions and Market Authority about fake reviews being generated. Additionally, the type of rating search property will determine the specifics of how it operates and how to gather and manage reviews there. Keep reading to get an in-depth explanation of each type of Google star rating available on the search engine results pages (SERPs). How To Get Google Star Ratings On Different Search Properties As mentioned above, there are different types of Google star ratings available across search results, including the standard blue-link listings, ads, local pack results, rich snippets, third-party reviews, and app store results. Here’s what the different types of star-rating results look like in Google and how they work on each listing type. Standard “Blue Link” Listings And Google Stars In 2021, Google started testing star ratings in organic search and has since kept this SERP feature intact. Websites can stand out from their competitors by getting stars to show up around their organic search results listing pages. Screenshot from SERPs, Google, February 2024 How To Get Google Stars On Organic SERPs If you want stars to show up on your organic search results, add schema markup to your website. Learn how to do that in the video below: As the video points out, you need actual reviews to get your structured data markup to show. Then, you can work with your development team to input the code on your site that indicates your average rating, highest, lowest, and total rating count. Screenshot JSON-LD script on Google Developers, August 2021 Once you add the rich snippet to your site, there is no clear timeline for when they will start appearing in the SERPs – that’s up to Google. In fact, Google specifically mentions that reviews in properties like search can take longer to appear, and often, this delay is caused by business profiles being merged.