Google reportedly has a bug that displays incorrect product reviews in Google Search for a retailer. It is now pulling from text on the page that includes the Google Business Profile reviews, despite the product reviews not being there and not being marked up on the page.
This issue was spotted by Brodie Clark who posted on the SERP Alert channel on X - he explained this in much greater detail and wrote that he "discovered a pretty massive flaw with Google's review snippets that a client of mine is taking advantage of."
Here is the web page that shows the Google Business Profile link and reviews:
He then also showed the Google product retailer reviews listed in Google Search:
Here is how he explained it:
The site doesn't have PDP reviews enabled and isn't marking anything up on the page related to reviews as a result (the correct practice).Instead, the site displays and links to their Google Business Profile at the top of all PDPs, with the number of reviews and average rating included.
Surprisingly, Google is bypassing their previous systems for review snippets for PDPs that are either picked up through structured data or feed-related information and taking into account the text that is shown on the page.
There is a major flaw in this approach from Google's end, as any site could make up an average rating and add it to their PDPs, and Google would then show it in search results at scale for all products – and it wouldn't technically be against any specific guidelines.
And no, this isn't being picked up directly from the GBP listing. The reason that I know this is because it is providing an exact number of reviews (3000 of them), while the GBP listing has much more than this (over 4000 now).
In the meantime, my client is receiving considerable benefit from this issue, so I can't complain.
I assume Google will fix this soon?
Forum discussion at X.
