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Thread
I'm writing an article for Semrush about the impact of customer reviews on search engine rankings.
I know that customer reviews can directly impact your rankings in local search results. However, that's not the case for web search results. Specifically, customer reviews on third-party sites can't directly impact your search engine rankings. John Mueller even confirmed this once.
But I think that these reviews can indirectly impact your rankings. How? I'd love to know.
Hey @Ankit Vora,
Long story short: you can't know, and you will never know whether customer reviews impact rankings.
It's always going to be speculation.
With that said, we can
1 - Highlight facts
2 - Make educated guesses
Facts
One fact about customer reviews is that they help you gain SERP real estate if you have the right structured data markup.
Search listings with rich results are bigger than others, so it can be a plus for you in this way.
Educated Guesses
Google uses LLMs (they have been doing so for years) to understand web content and entities (companies, products, etc.).
It's hard to speculate that Google does not use reviews to understand your products, services or company.
But that does not mean that Google rewards websites that have reviews - those are 2 different things.
The more reviews you have, and the more positive these reviews are, the more likely you are to be a trustworthy company, which Google may or may not recognize.
All this to say: Google definitely uses reviews to understand who you are and what you're trying to do, including how good or popular your product is.
Do positive reviews correlate with better rankings? No.
Do positive reviews positively impact rankings. Probably not.
But we'll never know. That's the fun of SEO 🙂
If the reviews show and there are more on your listing than the listing above, it's quite possible that people click the option with the most reviews instead of the listing that is top of google.
That action over time means good things for your page and bad things for the page currently occupying top spot.
You might want to chat with Chelsea from - she's got a whole business around getting reviews.
As others have noted, we can't know for sure. Here are some additional thoughts.
One way reviews on third-party websites (indirectly) impact non-local site's rankings is in terms of backlinks. Reviews on G2 / Capterra / etc. are valuable in three ways 1) Additional traffic sources 2) Reputation management and 3) They link back to your site.
Once a potential customer has seen your site/company/product on these third-party sites, they're more likely to click on you in organic search results, and increased CTR is generally believed to be good for ranking (assuming there's minimal pogo-sticking attached to those clickthroughs).
You can even juice the importance of those third-party review pages by leveraging sameAs structured data pointing to those pages (Google treats them as backlinks). I wrote about this here: