Learn / Strategy
How agents use reviews and ratings
Reviews and ratings influence an agent’s decision where they are readable as data and not at all where they are rendered by a widget after the page loads. Since review widgets are among the most common client rendered components on a storefront, many stores have accumulated strong social proof that does not count toward them in any comparison.
Reviews influence an agent’s decision where they are readable as data, and not at all where they are rendered by a third party widget after the page loads. That second case is extremely common, which means a lot of hard won social proof is currently counting for nothing.
The widget problem
Review platforms typically inject ratings client side. The page shows four and a half stars from several hundred reviews, and the served markup contains an empty container.
To anything reading your markup, the product has no rating, and a product with no rating loses to a comparable product with one. Most review platforms can also emit the aggregate rating as structured data, and turning that on is usually a setting rather than a project.
What the score is used for
A comparable value among survivors of the filtering stage. It rarely gets you into a candidate set on its own and it frequently decides between two options that both satisfy the constraints.
Which means it matters most when everything else is right, and matters not at all when your price or availability is missing.
What the text is used for
Specifics your own copy does not state. Whether a garment runs small, whether a device works with a particular model, how something held up after a year. Those are constraint answers, and they often exist only in reviews.
Where a pattern in your reviews answers a common question, promote it into your own product data rather than leaving it to be discovered. See how to write product copy an agent can parse.
What to do
- Check whether your aggregate rating and review count are in the served markup.
- If not, enable structured data output in your review platform.
- Make sure the rating is per product rather than a site wide score, which answers a different question.
- Mine recurring review themes for facts that belong in your product data.
Questions
Are my reviews readable right now?
Fetch a product page and look for the rating value and count in the served markup. If they only appear once the widget has loaded, they are not readable, which is the common case rather than the exception.
Does the review text matter or just the score?
Both, differently. The score is a comparable value. The text is where specifics about fit, durability and real world use live, and those can answer constraints your own copy does not address.
Do more reviews help?
Volume supports confidence in a score, and it does nothing if the score is not readable. Making an existing rating legible is almost always a better return than collecting more of them.