Google has made an updated to the review snippets rich results report within Google Search Console today. This change may result in a “reduction in the number of Review objects in this report,” the search company said.
What changed. Google said it is no longer counting top-level schema.org/Rating objects in the Reviews Snippet results report. Previously, before December 14, 2021, Google did count these top-level rating objects but after December 14th, Google is no longer counting them.
What is the impact. Google said the impact may be that you might “see a reduction in the number of Review objects in this report.”
Reporting change. This seems to be just a reporting change, although it is not clear if Google previously showed review snippets for top-level rating objects in the Google search results before. Google simply said the reviews snippet rich results report will no longer count the top-level rating object. Google did not say anything has changed outside of the reporting.
Rich snippet enhancement report. The new rich snippet Enhancement report is available for those sites who have implemented reviews or ratings structured data. The report allows you to see errors, warnings, and valid pages for markup implemented on your site. If there are items you need to fix, like other enhancement reports, this report will walk you through the process of fixing the report.
This report launched back in February 2020.
Why we care. If you see a drop in the reported objects in this report, note that this is a change on Google’s end on how it counts reviews. There is nothing you specifically changed on your end to warrant the reductions in the number of Review objects in this report.