Google seems to no longer be showing review rich reviews in Google Search when review schema or structured data is added to healthcare web pages.
A review snippet is a short excerpt of a review or a rating from a review website, usually an average of the combined rating scores from many reviewers, these are visibile in the form of stars in the Google search results.
Andrea Badder at Schema App noticed this change and wrote, "Across our healthcare customers, we’ve observed a drop in Review Snippet visibility since late May, with another drop occurring in early August for some organizations."
She shared a sample chart from Google Search Console's performance report filtered by search appearance:
She wrote:
Our Customer Success team investigated the decline to determine whether Schema Markup implementation was responsible. Testing different ways of connecting aggregateRating, alternative property paths, and multi-typing healthcare entities with Product did not restore Review Snippet performance.What was more telling was how our healthcare customers responded.
While some were open to further testing, many weren’t interested in changing semantically accurate Schema Markup simply to try to recover the rich result. Their priority was ensuring their markup continued to accurately represent their physicians, locations, services, specialties, and relationships for search engines and AI systems.
Rich results are still valuable when Google awards them. But earning a particular rich result is becoming a smaller part of what an advanced Schema Markup strategy needs to accomplish.
For healthcare organizations especially, accurately defining your organization for machines is the utmost priority.
Google has a history of turning off support for select rich results and even rich results for specific industries.
I wonder if Google decided to just turn them all off for the medical space?
I do not personally see them coming up when I do searches for doctors, dentists, etc, outside of the local results...
Forum discussion at X.
