AggregateRating Schema: Complete Reference

By Amit Patel

AggregateRating represents the averaged rating across many reviews — a single star score plus a review count — and it nests inside other types like Product, SoftwareApplication, and Recipe to power the star ratings you see in results. It is rarely used alone; it is the summary rating a parent entity carries. Understanding it means knowing its required fields, how it differs from a single Review, and that it inherits the same self-serve policy that governs all ratings.

What AggregateRating Does

It summarizes many reviews into one score — an average value and the number of ratings behind it — which is what produces the “4.5 (128)” stars in a rich result.

Where a single Review is one person’s rating, AggregateRating is the roll-up. It is the rating format most product and software pages actually use, because searchers care about the overall score more than any single review.

Required Fields

The essentials are ratingValue (the average), ratingCount or reviewCount (how many), and a scale via bestRating/worstRating if not the default 1–5.

The count must be real and greater than zero — an AggregateRating with no reviews behind it is invalid and a policy risk. Keep ratingValue within the declared scale. These fields feed the visible stars, so accuracy matters both for validity and trust.

How It Nests

AggregateRating is placed inside a parent type — most often Product or SoftwareApplication — as the aggregateRating property, describing the average rating of that specific item.

It does not stand alone as a page’s primary type; it always modifies something. That is why you configure it within Product or app markup rather than as its own block. The parent type determines whether stars are even eligible to appear.

The Rules It Inherits

AggregateRating follows the same policies as Review: no self-serve ratings of your own organization, genuine and visible ratings only, and eligible parent types — violations risk a manual action.

The most common failure is a business putting an AggregateRating about itself on its own pages, which the self-serve rule prohibits exactly as it does for Review. Ratings must reflect real, countable reviews shown on the page. Validate with the Rich Results Test.

Example Markup

AggregateRating nested in a Product (shown as code):

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Product",
  "name": "Example Widget",
  "aggregateRating": {
    "@type": "AggregateRating",
    "ratingValue": 4.5,
    "reviewCount": 128,
    "bestRating": 5
  }
}
</script>

See JSON-LD vs Microdata for the format.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Bottom Line

AggregateRating is the summary star score that lives inside Product and app markup — simple, high-impact, and bound by the same honesty rules as Review. Nest it in an eligible type, keep the value and count real, never self-serve, and it delivers the stars that lift click-through, following the policy discipline of the wider schema cluster.