Merchant Review policies and partner requirements

Merchant reviews are reviews of online stores and are used in Store Ratings.

Partner review collection policies

These collection requirements are designed to promote fair and unbiased reviews and apply to all reviews collected and displayed on partner sites, regardless of whether they are sent to Google.

• Incentivized Reviews: Merchants are not allowed to offer their customers financial incentives to write reviews of any kind. This includes but is not limited to free samples, gift cards, discounts on future purchases, or anything of monetary value. If a review provider discovers a merchant has offered incentives, these reviews should be removed from the feed and Google should be notified via this form.
• Review collection window: Users must complete their review within 90 days of receiving an invitation. If review editing is supported, reviews can be edited past the 90 days.
• Review scale: All merchant ratings must be collected on a 1-5 or 1-10 scale.
• Direct review collection: Only reviews directly collected by a review provider should be sent through the Google feed or displayed and factored into ratings on a review provider’s merchant page. Scraped or imported reviews from another review provider or directly collected by the merchant should never be sent through the Google feed or displayed and factored into ratings on the merchant page. Reviews collected on a merchant's site must be directly collected by the review provider and can not be collected by the merchant and then passed to the review provider. Review providers are not allowed to partner with other companies that collect reviews and display those reviews on their behalf.
• Public reviews page: Each merchant must have a page that is public, visible, and discoverable via search engines with all reviews shown. For example, the merchant pages should be included in the sitemap shared with search engines. These merchant pages and corresponding reviews should never be deleted after a merchant stops collecting reviews with a given review provider and the previous reviews should continue to be included in feeds to Google, except where reviews are deleted for content guideline violations or at a user's request. For example, if a merchant switches review providers, the original reviews provider should maintain a page with the reviews previously collected for that merchant and continue to submit those reviews in their feed to Google.

Review moderation policies

These moderation requirements are designed to promote fair and unbiased reviews and apply to all reviews collected and displayed on partner sites, regardless of whether they are sent to Google.

• Merchants must not be able to remove or moderate their reviews.
• Reviews may be flagged and removed only if the content contains hateful, violent, or inappropriate content, advertising or spam, is off-topic, or contains conflicts of interest.
• The review provider must have a set of requirements for removing user reviews and those requirements must be shared with Google via your Google point of contact for the reviews program or using this form.
• Reviewers have the ability to delete reviews at any time.
• While a user review is undergoing investigation, the review still must be sent to Google.
• These moderation policies apply to all reviews, including solicited and unsolicited.

Review content policies

All reviews must follow Google’s content policies. We endeavor to remove reviews or block entire feeds that violate these policies when we become aware of such content.

These content policies apply to all partners submitting Merchant Reviews.

• Spam: We remove spam content, including reviews detected to contain irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text.
• Dangerous products or acts: We remove reviews related to regulated products that can cause damage, harm, or injury. For example, don’t submit reviews of guns, tobacco products, or regulated drugs. Additionally, don’t include content that depicts or provides instructions to complete activities that are dangerous and/or widely illegal.
• Phone numbers, email addresses or URLs: We remove review content containing phone numbers, email addresses and links to other websites.
• Personal and confidential information: We remove reviews that contain personal information, including but not limited to full names, credit card information, national insurance number, driving license information, etc.
• Keep it clean: We remove reviews that use obscene, profane, or offensive language or include content that depicts scenes of violence, serious injury or death, contains personal attacks, or are defamatory or harassing.
• Conflict of interest: We remove reviews that were paid for or are otherwise inauthentic. Reviews are most valuable when they are honest and unbiased. We remove reviews that we believe have conflicts of interest and/or have been written by employees or people with a vested interest in the website being reviewed. Only submit reviews that were honestly solicited from customers.
• Illegal content: We remove reviews that contain or link to unlawful content, such as links that facilitate the sale of prescription drugs without a prescription, illegal drugs, counterfeit products, or illicit weapons. This content is not allowed.
• Malware & Phishing: We remove reviews containing links to malware, viruses, or other harmful software. We don't allow phishing or other content that harms or interferes with the operation of the networks, servers, or other infrastructure of Google or others.
• Copyrighted content: We remove reviews that infringe on others' rights, including copyright. For more information or to file a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) request, review our copyright procedures.
• Trademark infringement: We remove content that uses a trademark in a way that’s confusing, deceptive, or misleading.
• Plagiarism: We remove reviews containing appropriation of content created by another person or entity.
• Automated Content: We remove reviews that are primarily generated by an automated program or artificial intelligence application.
• Sexually explicit material: We remove reviews that contain sexually explicit material or that sexually exploit children or present them in a sexual manner. For this type of content, we remove the review, shut down the merchant reviews feed, and send a report to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) and to law enforcement. This content is not allowed.
• Hate speech: We remove reviews that advocate against groups of people based on their race or ethnic origin, nationality, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, sexual orientation, or gender identity. Violent language, terrorist content, or content intended to incite and encourage violent acts or extremist behavior, are not allowed in reviews.
• Cross promotion of other products/websites: We remove reviews that include promotional content for other unrelated websites, products, or services.
• Off-topic reviews: We remove reviews that primarily seek to discuss other topics unrelated to the website being reviewed. This includes comments about political or social controversy, attacks on others, or reviews that don't represent a first-hand experience with the website. This also includes merchant responses to reviewer comments.
• Impersonation: We remove reviews from people claiming to be someone that they aren't.
• Language: Reviews should be submitted in the original language they are written in.
• Duplicate content: Each review should only appear in one feed and only once in that feed. The same review shouldn't appear in feeds from different partners or be duplicated across domains. The partner should own the review and shouldn't send Google content syndicated from other sources. In the case of duplicate reviews in multiple feeds, we may remove one or more of the reviews or entire feeds.
• Low quality content: We remove reviews that contain partial, incomplete, or extremely short review comments or reviews that contain poor formatting, poor punctuation, or gibberish. We don’t allow boilerplate text, for example, text that is pre-populated for users. We may remove reviews that contain non-functional content, for example, review URLs must lead to a working reviews page site that displays reviews.

We use a combination of automated and human evaluation to ensure that content and reviews comply with our policies. Our enforcement technologies use machine-learning algorithms to help protect our merchants and users by keeping our shopping platforms safe. More complex, nuanced, or severe cases are reviewed and evaluated by our specially trained experts who conduct content evaluations that might be difficult for algorithms to perform alone, for example, because an understanding of the context of the piece of content is required.

We take action on content and reviews that violate our policies. This may include disapproving of violating content or a violating review, as well as issuing warnings and/or temporarily or permanently suspending accounts for repeated or egregious violations. We take repeat violations of our policies seriously.

Upon request, we’ll sometimes remove content under applicable laws or in response to a court order. Submit legal requests here.

Request a review for your Merchant Review issues

If your content is disapproved and you’ve fixed the issue or you disagree with the issue, you can request a review. If the review is successful, your issue will disappear. If the disapproval remains and you’re uncertain how to proceed, contact us for support.