Google Showing Reviews Snippets About Products In Knowledge Panels

Google continues to iterate how reviews and ratings are incorporated into ads and organic listings. Blocks of Review snippets that show “What people are saying” about a product are now appearing frequently and accounting for a large area of real estate in product knowledge panels, which Google calls “product card units”.

Reviews have long been a part of product cards of course, but the pullout quotes related to specific product features or qualities are a relatively new variation on how Google displays reviews data.

The occurrence of these snippets is prevalent across a wide array of products that have a sizable number of reviews. (In my research, I learned that fax machines are not only still a thing, but have loads of reviews as you can see in the example above.)

There’s no real way to find the source of these reviews quotes. Google aggregates reviews across a number of reviews sites and retailers — this fax machine listing pulls in product reviews from 14 different sources — and doesn’t provide a source for each snippet.

Clicking on either of the “reviews” links in the panel takes you to the reviews page for the product in Google Shopping. While it’s not apparent that the retailer or other reviews source names are links, clicking on the them will take you to the product or reviews page on that respective site.

In the screenshot below, “Office Depot” are links to the reviews on the retailer’s site.

Like any click from Google Shopping to a retailer’s site, clicks from a review link to the retailer site are also charged a cost-per-click.