Review Widget

What is Review Widget?

A review widget is an element embedded on your website that displays your star rating or a selection of guest reviews. It's usually added with a short snippet of code and updates itself as new reviews arrive on Google, Yelp, Tripadvisor or your own review collection.

For a restaurant, the website is often the last stop before a guest books a table or places an order. A widget puts the reassurance of other guests' experiences right where that decision happens, on the homepage, the menu page or each location's page.

Review widgets come with rules attached. Each review platform sets display terms, Google treats reviews a business shows about itself differently in Search, and US law limits how selectively you can present them.

This page covers the types of widget, where reviews come from, those rules, and how to set widgets up across many locations.

This page is general information and no substitute for legal advice. Platform policies and laws change, so it's worth checking the current version for each market you operate in.

How a review widget works

Most review widgets follow the same four steps, whether you build one yourself or use a provider:

1. Sourcing. The widget connects to one or more review sources, such as a platform's API, your own review collection form or a reputation platform that has already gathered your reviews through review aggregation.
2. Selection. Rules decide which reviews appear: the most recent, those with written text, a minimum length, a particular location or a hand-picked set.
3. Display. A script, an iframe or server-rendered HTML shows the rating and reviews in a badge, carousel, grid or list on your page.
4. Refresh. The widget updates on a schedule or when new reviews arrive, within whatever caching limits the source platform allows.

Types of review widgets

A rating badge is the simplest type. It shows your overall star rating, the review count and the source, and some platforms, including Tripadvisor, offer their own badges to listed businesses. A location feed shows recent reviews for one restaurant on that location's page.

Review carousel

A carousel rotates through individual reviews, usually showing a few at a time. It brings guests' own words onto the page, which tends to feel more persuasive than a number alone. Carousels that move on their own need a pause control, as the accessibility section explains.

Where review widget content comes from

Reviews from a widely known platform carry extra credibility, because visitors know you can't edit them. First-party reviews, collected through your own forms, give you full control over display, which also places the full responsibility for fair presentation on you.

A steady flow of new reviews keeps any widget current. Inviting every guest to share their experience through fair review solicitation is what gives the widget something fresh to show.

Review widget display rules by platform

Google reviews in a widget

Google offers no ready-made review widget for Business Profiles, so most widgets that show Google reviews draw on the Places API. Google's Places API policies require the author's name to appear close to each review, recommend showing the author's photo and profile link, and restrict caching Places content.

The API returns up to five reviews for a place, which is why many Google review widgets show only a handful at a time. Your full rating and reviews live on your Google Business Profile, which a widget can link to.

Yelp reviews in a widget

Yelp's developer API provides short review excerpts and sets its own branding and link-back requirements. Yelp also discourages businesses from asking for reviews, so a widget that shows Yelp reviews is best kept free of "review us on Yelp" prompts.

Tripadvisor and other platforms

Tripadvisor provides badges and widgets that listed businesses can embed, which display the rating and link to the listing. Other platforms vary widely, and some don't permit reusing their reviews at all, so checking each platform's current terms before displaying its reviews avoids surprises.

Review widgets and Google Search

Many businesses add review widgets hoping for gold stars next to their pages in Google Search. For a restaurant's own website, that rarely happens. Google's 2019 post on making review rich results more helpful explains that it no longer shows review rich results for LocalBusiness and Organization pages when the business controls the reviews.

Google defines those reviews as self-serving when a review about a business appears on that business's own website, whether in its markup or through an embedded third-party widget. Adding Review or AggregateRating markup to your location pages therefore won't produce stars in organic results.

The stars guests see in Google Maps and the local pack come from your Google Business Profile reviews, which are separate from your website. A widget's value lies with the visitors already on your page, helping them decide to book or order.

Some marketers believe fresh review text on location pages supports local SEO for restaurants. Google hasn't said that it does, so it's best treated as an industry belief.

Momos's article on why location pages aren't ranking covers the factors that matter more.

Review widgets and FTC rules

In the US, the FTC's Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials bans misrepresenting that the reviews on the review portion of your website are all or most of the reviews submitted when reviews have been suppressed based on their ratings or negative sentiment.

The rule allows a business to leave out reviews for reasons that apply to every review equally, such as abusive language or content unrelated to what you sell, as long as the rating plays no part in the decision. Knowing violations of an FTC rule can bring civil penalties.

For a widget, the practical question is what the design implies. A widget titled "What our guests say" that shows only 5-star reviews beside a perfect rating suggests a complete picture that doesn't exist. A widget labeled as highlights, next to your full rating and a link to every review, leaves visitors correctly informed.

The same principle runs through Google's and the FTC's rules on review gating: the reviews people see should reflect the experiences of the guests who visited.

Review widget accessibility

A widget is part of your website, so it needs to meet the same accessibility standards as everything else on the page. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, published by the W3C in October 2023, are the reference most organizations use.

• Moving content needs a pause control. WCAG 2.2 success criterion 2.2.2, Pause, Stop, Hide, applies to content that starts moving automatically and lasts more than five seconds, which includes most auto-rotating carousels.
• Stars need a text equivalent. A screen reader should announce "Rated 4.6 out of 5 from 1,240 reviews" instead of reading a row of icons or nothing at all.
• Keyboard users need full access. Next and previous buttons, filters and "read more" links should all work with the keyboard and show a visible focus outline.
• Iframes need a title. A descriptive title, such as "Guest reviews for our Downtown location", tells assistive technology what the frame contains.
• Text needs contrast and size. Light gray review text on white and very small fonts are common in off-the-shelf widgets and hard for many guests to read.

Review widget performance

Many widgets load scripts, fonts, styles and reviewer photos from another company's servers, which can slow your pages. Google's Core Web Vitals, as described on web.dev, treat a page as good when Largest Contentful Paint is 2.5 seconds or less, Interaction to Next Paint is 200 milliseconds or less and Cumulative Layout Shift is 0.1 or less.

Widgets most often hurt layout shift, because they appear after the page has loaded and push content down. Reserving the widget's space in advance, loading it after the main content, limiting the number of reviews and photos, and keeping it off the top of mobile pages all reduce the impact.

Review widgets for multi-location brands

For a restaurant group, one brand-wide widget on every page tends to mislead. A guest reading about your airport location gains little from reviews of your downtown flagship, and a strong brand average can hide a location that's struggling.

A few practices keep this manageable across dozens or hundreds of locations:

• Match each widget to the right listing. Mapping every location page to its own Google place ID or platform listing prevents a page from showing another location's reviews, which is easiest when your listings data is accurate through listings management.
• Use one template. A shared design and the same selection rules everywhere keep the brand consistent and make it simple to audit.
• Decide who controls settings. Franchise brands benefit from central rules on which reviews can appear, with local teams able to feature reviews within those rules.

Fresh reviews matter on every location page. Review recency affects how current a widget looks, since a feed whose newest review is eight months old suggests nobody is paying attention.

How to set up a review widget

1. Choose the sources. Google is the most widely recognized source for most US restaurants, with Yelp, Tripadvisor or your own reviews where they matter to your guests.
2. Read each platform's display terms. Attribution, branding, caching and the number of reviews allowed all vary.
3. Set fair selection rules. Rules based on recency, text length or location are easy to explain; filtering by rating calls for clear labeling.
4. Pick the type for each page. Badges suit headers and order pages, location feeds suit location pages, and carousels suit the homepage.
5. Check accessibility and speed. Test with a keyboard, a screen reader and a mobile speed test before rolling out to every location.
6. Review it each quarter. Confirm every widget still loads, shows the right location and reflects your current rating.

Pros and cons of review widgets

Best review widget tools

The most useful review widget tools pull from the platforms your guests trust, map each widget to the right location, follow each platform's display rules, and load quickly on mobile. For a restaurant group, central control over design and selection rules matters as much as the widget itself.

The widget is only as good as the reviews behind it, so the tools below include platforms that display reviews on your website and one that keeps the review flow fresh and answered.

Dedicated widget providers and website platforms also offer review widgets, so comparing a few options against your own sources, locations and website setup is worth doing before you roll one out.

Common review widget mistakes

• Showing the same reviews on every location page. Guests want to know about the restaurant they're considering, and brand-wide reviews can mislead them.
• Filtering out every negative review without saying so. Presenting a 5-star-only selection as your full set of reviews runs against the FTC's 2024 rule and erodes trust when guests compare it with Google.
• Expecting Google stars from review markup. Self-serving reviews on LocalBusiness pages haven't been eligible for review rich results since 2019.
• Leaving out attribution. Google's policies require the author's name next to each Google review, and other platforms have their own branding rules.
• Auto-rotating carousels with no pause. Moving content without a pause control fails WCAG and frustrates guests trying to read.
• Letting widgets go stale. A feed whose latest review is many months old suggests a restaurant nobody is looking after.

History of review widgets

Businesses have long quoted happy customers on menus and in shop windows. Online review widgets followed once review platforms grew large enough that their ratings carried weight with diners, and badges linking back to a business's Tripadvisor or Yelp page became a familiar sight on restaurant websites.

Search engines then took an interest in reviews on business websites. Google introduced rich snippets in May 2009, which could show star ratings in search results from structured markup. In June 2011, Google, Bing and Yahoo launched Schema.org, whose Review and AggregateRating types became the standard way to mark up reviews.

In September 2019, Google announced in "Making review rich results more helpful" that it would stop showing review stars for LocalBusiness and Organization pages when the business controls the reviews about itself. Google described such reviews as "self-serving", including when they appear through an embedded third-party widget.

Regulators turned to how businesses display reviews on their own sites. In January 2022, the FTC announced that Fashion Nova would pay $4.2 million to settle allegations that it used a third-party review interface to hold back reviews below four stars from its website, and it notified ten review management companies that suppressing negative reviews violates the FTC Act.

In August 2024, the FTC published its Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, which took effect on October 21, 2024. It includes a specific ban on presenting the reviews on your website as complete when negative ones have been suppressed.