Last updated on October 28, 2023.
By accessing Trustindex’s websites and utilizing its features related to Google Seller Ratings, you are agreeing to be bound by the following definitions and conditions. Please read these terms carefully before using our services. Your use of Trustindex signifies your acceptance of these terms and your agreement to comply with them. If you do not agree with any part of these terms, please refrain from using our website and its features.
What are Seller Ratings?
Seller ratings are essential in guiding people toward businesses that provide excellent customer experiences, boosting trust and facilitating well-informed purchasing choices. Therefore, these ratings assist merchants in enhancing the effectiveness of their advertisements and natural search results, attracting a more qualified customer base to their landing pages.
Where and how Seller Ratings appear
Seller ratings display your store’s customer experience in both paid and unpaid formats and can appear on mobile and web platforms across the Search Network and YouTube. These ratings typically consist of:
- A 5-star rating scale
- The total count of ratings received by the business
- Supplementary details, like the average delivery time, providing context for the rating (when such data is accessible)
- A link directing users to read the most recent reviews
Paid
Text Ads
Seller ratings showcase a rating and additional information alongside your text ads, informing individuals about highly-rated advertisers for the quality of their service. To display a seller rating on text ads, a rating of 3.5 or higher is necessary.
Unpaid
Rich results
Rich results can include seller ratings that appear alongside search results for a specific merchant when consumers are shopping on Google. These ratings typically showcase the star rating and the total number of reviews.
Free listings
In free product listings within Search or Shopping, seller ratings present a rating beside a merchant’s name, assisting shoppers in establishing trust with businesses when considering a product purchase.
Checking your own seller rating
To verify whether you have a seller rating, modify the URL by replacing “{yourwebsiteurl}” with your actual homepage URL in this link: https://www.google.com/shopping/ratings/account/lookup?q={yourwebsiteurl}
Once your site meets the minimum seller rating criteria, you’ll gain access to details about your store and seller ratings.
If your website domain differs across various countries, repeat the aforementioned process for each domain variation. In cases where your site employs the same domain across multiple countries and has reviews in these various regions, the URL provided will display information for one specific country.
To view ratings for other countries, you can modify the country code in the browser URL. For instance, if the URL includes “c=UK,” you can adjust this to “c=US” to access ratings for the United States.
Please note: If we lack information about your store or if it fails to meet the minimum seller rating criteria, a seller ratings page might not load for your homepage. Moreover, an incorrect URL value or an invalid homepage might hinder the loading of a seller ratings page.
Having a seller rating connected to your domain does not guarantee that your seller rating will be displayed on ads. The appearance of seller ratings on ads is contingent upon auction dynamics and various other factors.
Criteria for Seller Ratings
Seller ratings are only available to those who meet one of the following criteria:
- Google collected a sufficient number of unique reviews for a specific country within the last 12 months through Google Customer Reviews or third-party review platform partners to accurately calculate a seller rating. The required quantity of reviews can differ for each business, but most merchants can acquire a rating after accumulating 100+ reviews.
- Google or its partners have conducted an assessment or evaluation of your site.
Moreover, the following criteria must be fulfilled:
- For text ads, an average composite rating of 3.5 stars or higher is required. However, unpaid listings can still display seller ratings even if the average rating is below 3.5 stars.
- The visible URL domain in the ad must align with the domain for which the ratings are available.
Reviews from customers in a particular country will exclusively contribute to the business’ rating in that specific country.
Seller ratings might not be displayed when the provided feedback is not relevant to what is being advertised in a specific ad.
Requirements for Seller Rating Partners
The requirements are applicable to all reviews gathered and displayed on partner websites, regardless of whether they are transmitted to Google. These revised requirements have been in effect for reviews collected from July 2020 onward.
Criteria for All Review Collection
- Merchants are prohibited from providing their customers with financial incentives to write reviews of any form.
(i) This prohibition includes, but is not confined to, offerings such as gift cards, free samples, discounts on future purchases, or any item of monetary value.
(ii) In the event that a review provider identifies that a merchant has offered incentives, such reviews are expected to be deleted from the feed, and Google should be informed via this form.
- Users are required to finalize their review within 90 days after receiving an invitation. Reviews that support editing can be modified even after the 90-day period has lapsed.
- All merchant ratings need to be collected on a scale of 1-5 or 1-10.
- Only reviews that are directly collected by a review provider should be forwarded through the Google feed or exhibited and included in the ratings on a review provider’s merchant page.
(i) Imported or scraped reviews from another review provider or reviews directly collected by the merchant should never be conveyed through the Google feed or factored into ratings on the merchant’s page.
(ii) Reviews gathered on a merchant’s site must be acquired directly by the review provider and cannot be obtained by the merchant and subsequently transferred to the review provider.
(iii) Additionally, review providers are not permitted to collaborate with other companies that collect reviews and exhibit those reviews on their behalf.
- Every merchant eligible for seller ratings must maintain a page that is public, visible, and easily discoverable via search engines, showcasing all the reviews. For instance, these merchant pages should be incorporated into the sitemap shared with search engines.
- Merchant pages and their associated reviews should not be removed even after a merchant discontinues collecting reviews with a specific review provider. The previous reviews should persist and continue to be included in feeds to Google unless the reviews are deleted due to content guideline violations or at a user’s request. For instance, if a merchant changes their review provider, the original reviews provider should reserve a page containing the reviews previously collected for that merchant and continue to submit those reviews in their feed to Google.
Fair Moderation Guidelines
- Merchants do not have the authority to delete or moderate their reviews.
- Reviews can be flagged for removal only in cases where the content contains hate speech, violence, inappropriate material, advertising, spam, off-topic information, or conflicts of interest.
- The review provider is required to maintain a set of criteria for the removal of user reviews, and these criteria must be shared with Google either through your Google point of contact for the reviews program or by using this form.
- Reviewers have the option to delete their reviews whenever they wish.
- Even if a user review is under investigation, it must still be submitted through Google feeds.
- The fair moderation guidelines are enforced for all reviews, whether they are solicited or unsolicited reviews.