Google Looking Into Review Stars Dropping Out Of The Search Results

Last week, webmasters began noticing huge drops in reviews and review stars showing up in the Google search results. In fact, the Mozcast SERP Feature Graph shows the decline, from showing up in about 35 percent of the queries to 22 percent of the queries in the past several days.

Here is the graph from Moz:

We asked Google about this last week, and Google told us today that “we’re looking into it and will let you know when we have more details.”

It is hard to say if Google intentionally removed the review stars from the search results. But a huge percentage of the queries Moz tracks show a significant decline in review snippets, so this seems like a bug to me, but Google will hopefully get back to us soon with more details.

The important thing to note is that if your review stars are missing in the search results, you are not alone.

Postscript: After reporting this to Google, it seems a day later the reviews are beginning to return to the search results. We are guessing this was a bug, although Google did not give us any statement confirming a bug or not.