How to show your Google reviews on your website without breaking the rules

You can show real Google reviews on a website in three ways. Use a live badge for the star rating, which stays correct on its own. Copy a hand-picked set of reviews onto a reviews page, with the reviewer's name and date. Or add a third-party widget, which is the easiest and the one you control least. On two recent builds we used the first two, and we ran into two limits that apply to anyone doing this, a cache and a five-review ceiling.

Why show reviews on the site at all

People check a business's reviews before they call. If they have to leave your site to see them, some will not come back. Putting your rating next to the call button removes that step. It does not replace the profile itself, and our guide to getting Google reviews without being weird about it covers how to earn them in the first place, including the ACCC rules on incentives.

Option 1: a live rating badge

For a builder whose site we moved off Wix on 1 July, the site shows a live 5.0 star rating based on 18 reviews at the time, pulled from the business's own Google Business Profile. Before this, the Wix site published no reviews at all. The ones now shown are real Google reviews, and were not written for the site.

The mechanics are worth knowing, because they decide whether the number goes stale.

• The page asks our server for the rating. The server asks Google, using the Places API (a Google service for reading business information).
• The answer is stored for one hour. If someone loads the page in that hour, they get the stored answer. After an hour, the next visitor gets the stored answer while the server fetches a fresh one in the background.
• A small piece of script on the page then updates the badge on screen if the number has changed.

The one-hour store keeps the page quick and avoids asking Google on every visit. It means a new review can take up to an hour to appear. For a rating, that is fine.

Two practical details cost us time. The builder's profile is a service-area business with no street address, so a normal search by name did not return it, and we had to look up its identifier through a maps search instead. And in the local development environment the request to Google hung until we added an eight second timeout. Production was fine, but we kept the timeout so a slow answer from Google can never hold up a page.

Option 2: copy the reviews themselves

A rating badge shows a number. A reviews page shows the words, and that is what persuades someone. This is where we hit the five-review ceiling.

For a workwear and embroidery supplier we rebuilt on 9 October, the profile showed a 5.0 rating across 18 reviews. The Places API returned only five of them. That is the way the service works, because it gives a sample and not the full list. To show all 18 we collected them through a browser, reading the profile page as a visitor would. The result is a reviews page with a QR code that sends customers to the profile's write-a-review box.

If you copy reviews by hand, three rules keep it honest.

1. Use the reviewer's real name and the review as written. Do not edit the words.
2. Show reviews that are about the business the page represents.
3. Refresh them from time to time, so the page does not show a rating that is a year old.

Option 3: a third-party widget

Widget services let you paste a snippet and get a styled carousel. They are quick. The costs are another company's script on your site, a monthly fee in some cases, and a page that is slower and less likely to match your design. They also add a third-party address to your security policy, which can quietly break tracking if the policy is not updated, as we found with our own policy in our post on Google Ads tracking blocked by your website.

When the reviews belong to someone else

One more case came up in August. A new site we built for an appliance repair business had no reviews of its own, but its established sibling business in a nearby city had over 200. We decided the new site could show the sibling's real Google reviews as social proof. We set two rules.

• Attribute them everywhere. The hero rating line, the section heading and the footnote each said whose reviews they were and why: the new site was new. They were never allowed to read as the new business's own.
• No rating markup. We did not put an aggregate rating into the page's structured data. That rating belongs to a different business entity, and marking it up as the new site's rating is a structured data violation with a manual action risk. The stars are plain HTML.

We would be careful before doing it again. Reviews are the most trusted thing on a page, and a rating that cannot be traced to the business being shown does harm if a customer notices.

Where the stars belong in structured data

On a business site, a real aggregate rating belongs in the markup for the business itself, which on the builder's site comes from the same live source as the badge. It does not belong on every blog page. An audit of our client sites on 12 October found a review rating attached to 58 blog pages on one site and 41 on another, which is a review of the business showing up as a review of an article.

Choosing between them

For a rating at the top of the page, use a live badge with a cache. For a page that does the persuading, copy real reviews and keep them current. Use a widget only if nobody can maintain either. If your own profile has fewer than a handful of reviews, work on getting more before you build anything around them, using our post on the Google Business Profile map pack.

On our base plan a live rating and a reviews page are things we set up and keep working, because they are part of the site and its monthly report. Read about web design, or get started.