Seller ratings help people find businesses that offer high-quality customer experiences, helping to build trust and enabling more informed purchasing decisions. As a result, seller ratings can help merchants improve the performance of ads and organic listings and drive more qualified customers to their landing pages.
Getting started with seller ratings is the same whether you’re looking to enhance your ads or free listings.
Where and how seller ratings are displayed
Seller 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. Seller 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
Seller 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
Seller 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
Text ads
Seller ratings display a rating and qualifier next to your text ads, letting people know which advertisers are highly rated for quality service. A rating of 3.5 or above is required to display a seller rating on text ads.
How to participate
Getting started with seller ratings is the same whether you’re looking to enhance your ads or free listings.
Google gathers seller 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 seller rating in a given country, they'll appear on your ads and listings by default.
If you don’t have reviews or a seller rating for your shop, you can get started with any of the following services:
| Service | Description |
|---|---|
| Google Customer Reviews |
A free-of-charge program that collects post-fulfilment reviews on behalf of merchants, managed in Google Merchant Center. Learn how to sign up for Google Customer Reviews program using the onboarding guide. |
| Supported review partners | Google works with all the supported review partners shown below in this article. Contact any partner you’d like to work with directly. |
| Evaluation by Google and/or other evaluation partners |
These programs measure and analyse the quality of the shopping experience provided by online retailers. Google collects data about selected merchants and the shopping experience they provide through Google Search and Google-led research. To increase the ability for Google to collect data, make sure that you sign up for Google Merchant Center. |
Where ratings come from
Google doesn't modify existing seller 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 seller 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.Note: Reviews aren't verified by Google.
Supported review partners
We also source feedback from the following independent review websites:
- Ausgezeichnet.org
- Bazaarvoice
- Birdeye
- Bizrate Insights
- eKomi
- Feedaty
- Feedback Company
- Feefo
- KiyOh
- Klantenvertellen
- Okendo
- PowerReviews
- ProductReview.com.au
- RA Trustvox
- Reco.se
- Reputation.com
- ResellerRatings
- Reviews.io
- Reevoo
- Shopper Approved
- ShopVote.de
- ShopAuskunft
- Sitejabber
- Stamped.io
- Trusted Shops
- TrustPilot
- TurnTo
- Verified Reviews
- Yotpo
- If you already partner with Google on seller ratings and require support, contact us.
- If you’re a reviews aggregator and would like to partner with Google on seller ratings, read our requirements and fill out our interest form to have your eligibility reviewed.
- Note: Typically, only 1 or 2 new partners are added globally per year.
How to check if you have a seller rating
To find out if you have a seller rating, edit the following URL to replace ‘{yourwebsite}’ with your homepage URL:
https://www.google.com/shopping/ratings/account/lookup?q={yourwebsite}
You’ll be able to view information about your shop and seller ratings if your site meets the minimum seller 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 shop ratings
Below are some common issues that you might encounter with seller 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 seller reviews through Merchant Center. To respond to a seller review, go to the seller rating website and respond to the seller review. Currently, we don't display merchant responses to seller reviews.
If you believe seller 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 seller rating websites. If this information matches and you're unable to make changes, contact us to investigate this further.
My seller 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 seller rating website. If you notice your reviews have stopped appearing, make sure that the shop name and registered domain match in your Google Merchant Center account and third-party seller 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 12 months to allow us to confidently calculate a seller 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 seller rating to display on text 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 seller ratings when the underlying feedback is unrelated to what's being advertised in a specific ad.