Store ratings overview

Store ratings help people find businesses that offer high-quality customer experiences, helping to build trust and enabling more informed purchasing decisions. As a result, store ratings can help merchants improve the performance of ads and free listings and drive more qualified customers to their landing pages.

Getting started with store ratings is the same whether you’re looking to enhance your ads or free listings.

Where and how store ratings are displayed

Store ratings showcase your shop’s customer experience in ads and unpaid formats, and may show up on mobile and web across the Search Network and YouTube. Store ratings may include:

• A rating out of 5 stars
• The number of reviews that the business has received
• A qualifier, such as the average delivery time, that highlights why you got the rating (if data is available)
• A link to read recent reviews

Unpaid

Rich results

Store ratings may also appear alongside search results featuring a particular merchant when customers are shopping on Google, displaying the star rating and the number of reviews.

Free listings

Store ratings display a rating next to a merchant’s name when shoppers interact with a free product listing within Search or Shopping, helping shoppers build trust with businesses from which to purchase a product.

Ads

Store ratings display a rating and qualifier next to your ads, letting people know which advertisers are highly rated for quality service. A rating of 3.5 or above is required to display a store rating on ads. Here are examples of how your ratings may display on ads:

How to participate

Getting started with store ratings is the same whether you’re looking to enhance your ads or free listings.

Google gathers store ratings from reputable websites that aggregate business reviews, as well as from users on Google. These ratings primarily reflect customers' overall post-fulfilment consumer experience with your business on a country basis.

When you have a store rating in a given country, they will appear on your ads and listings by default.

If you don’t have reviews or a store rating for your shop, you can get started with any of the following services:

Where ratings come from

Google doesn't modify existing store ratings. To provide consistent ratings, we calibrate ratings and filter out what we consider to be untrustworthy (for example, spam and abuse) or otherwise questionable (for example, reviews that don’t indicate that a transaction took place). Google bases store ratings on a number of sources, including:

• Google Customer Reviews: A free-of-charge program that collects post-fulfilment reviews on behalf of merchants, managed in Google Merchant Center.
• Shopping reviews for your shop domain, which include post-fulfilment comments from the various supported review partners listed below, in addition to users of Google Search.
• Aggregated performance metrics from Google-led shopping research.

Supported review partners

How to check if you have a store rating

To find out if you have a store rating, edit the following URL to replace '{yourwebsite}' with your homepage URL:

You’ll be able to view information about your shop and store ratings if your site meets the minimum store rating thresholds.

If your website domain varies by country, repeat the above step for each variation. If your site uses the same domain across countries and has reviews in multiple countries, the above URL will return a page for one country. You can edit the country code in the browser URL to view other countries. For example, if the URL contains 'c=AU' you can update this to 'c=US' to view ratings for the US.

Troubleshooting store ratings

Below are some common issues that you might encounter with store ratings.

Incorrect ratings

If you've found ratings that you believe to be incorrect, you'll need to contact the site which hosts the reviews to resolve the matter. You can't respond to individual shop reviews through Merchant Center. To respond to a shop review, go to the store rating website and respond to the shop review. Currently, we don't display merchant responses to shop reviews.

If you believe that store ratings from a different shop are appearing with your products, make sure that your shop name and registered domain in your Merchant Center account are different from the other shop on the third-party store rating websites. If this information matches and you're unable to make changes, contact us to investigate this further.

My store ratings aren't appearing

Reviews aren't added in real-time, so you may notice a delay between receiving a new review and its addition to your rating. The same is true when a review is removed from a store rating website. If you notice that your reviews have stopped appearing, make sure that the shop name and registered domain match in your Google Merchant Center account and third-party store rating websites. You can update your shop name and website URL in Merchant Center. Learn more about how to set up your account.

For ratings to appear in a particular country, your business needs enough unique reviews for the country within the last 24 months to allow us to confidently calculate a store rating score. The number of reviews needed can vary by merchant, but most merchants are able to obtain a rating after collecting 100 or more eligible reviews (for example, post-fulfilment reviews, sometimes denoted by websites of review partners as 'verified' or 'post purchase').

For ads, additionally, the following criteria must be met for a store rating to display on ads:

• Average, composite, rating of 3.5 or more stars.
• The ad’s visible URL domain must match the domain for which we have the ratings.
• The reviews from customers in a given country will only contribute to the business' rating in that country. We may not show store ratings when the underlying feedback is unrelated to what's being advertised in a specific ad.

My Shopping Experience Scorecard shows missing store ratings

One of the main reasons why you’re receiving the missing store ratings message is that you don’t have enough reviews to generate a store rating. In order to get more reviews, ensure that you’re opted-in to Google Customer Reviews. You can check this in your Merchant Center in 'Customer Reviews setup' under the Tools and settings icon .

If you don’t have Google Customer Reviews setup, you can set it up by following the integration guide.

If you have Google Customer Reviews setup, you can monitor the number of reviews received on the 'Survey opt-ins received' page. Learn more about Google Customer Reviews.

If you’ve completed Google Customer Reviews setup and are still receiving a missing store ratings message, you might need to ensure that your sales volume is sufficient to generate reviews, or that your third-party reviews are exported into Google where available.

Shop insights panel

In addition to your store rating, shoppers will now also be able to view the shop insights panel with more information about your shop. This panel can include metrics such as Delivery, Returns, Competitive pricing and Payment options. These metrics will show your current rating from the Shopping Experience Scorecard and help shoppers make informed decisions when browsing your shop.