Product Ratings Program Policies

To ensure a good user experience and a healthy merchant ecosystem, the reviews should abide by the following policies to be eligible for Product Ratings on Shopping ads:

• Merchants should share all of their reviews with Google through periodic updates.
• Review feeds should adhere to content policies.
• Review feeds should be of high quality.
• Review feeds should be collected and owned by the merchant to get the benefit of stars on PLAs.

Merchants should share all of their reviews with Google through periodic updates

All reviews collected by merchants should be shared with Google to provide a transparent experience for our users. We do not allow information (such as low star reviews) to be hidden from our users. Moreover, as users find recent reviews very relevant to a product's rating, we need merchants to be up to date on the review feed sent to us. We recommend sending us weekly updates of your reviews.

Review feeds should adhere to content policies

Reviews are a great way to share both positive and negative opinions. However, we'll remove reviews that violate any of the content policies below:

• Spam: Please make sure your review feeds are clean and do not contain spam.
• Phone numbers, email addresses or URLs: To help prevent advertising and spam creeping into reviews, we don't allow phone numbers, email addresses or links to other websites in reviews.
• Personal and confidential information: Don't send reviews that contain a person's personal and confidential information, including but not limited to credit card information, national insurance number, driving licence information, etc.
• Keep it clean: Don't use obscene, profane or offensive language. We'll also remove reviews that represent personal attacks.
• Conflict of interest: Reviews are most valuable when they are honest and unbiased. If we believe that the review feed has a conflict of interest and has been written by employees or people with vested interest, we will remove the reviews.
• Illegal content: Don't send reviews that contain or link to unlawful content, such as links that facilitate the sale of prescription drugs without a prescription.
• Copyrighted content: Don't send reviews that infringe others' rights – including copyright. For more information or to file a DMCA request, review our copyright procedures.
• Plagiarism: We don't allow the appropriation of other people's content for a review.
• Sexually explicit material: We don't allow reviews that contain sexually explicit material. Also, we absolutely don't allow reviews that sexually exploit children or present them in a sexual manner. For this type of content, we'll remove the review, shut down the product review feed and send a report to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) and law enforcement.
• Hate speech: We don't allow reviews that advocate against groups of people based on their race or ethnic origin, nationality, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, sexual orientation or gender identity. Violent language should not be used in reviews.
• Cross promotion of other products/websites: Reviews should not include promotional content for other websites, products, services, etc.
• Off-topic reviews: We don't allow reviews that primarily seek to discuss other topics unrelated to the product itself. This includes comments about experiences with particular sellers, political or social controversy and attacks on others. We will also remove reviews that do not represent a first-hand experience with the product.
• Impersonation: We don't allow reviews from people claiming to be someone that they are not.

Review feeds should be high quality

In addition to adhering to the content policies, we demote reviews that are of poor quality (based on length of review and relevance and usefulness of review content). For example, a review like 'luv it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :):)' is considered to be of low quality. We also do not permit conversion of a review system with fewer than 5 stars to a 5-star review system. For example, assigning reviews to either 5 stars or 1 star through the use of binary questions such as 'Will you buy this product again (Yes/No)?' is not allowed.

Review feeds should be collected and owned by the merchant to get the benefit of stars on PLAs

All reviews that merchants share with us (either directly or through an approved third-party aggregator) must be collected and owned by the merchant. Merchants are not allowed to share reviews syndicated from other sources.

Exceptions to this rule include:

• The individual sellers that share a domain with a marketplace that collects and shares reviews are eligible for product ratings.
• If a merchant shares reviews with Google, accounts that other affiliates manage on its behalf are eligible for product ratings. Affiliates as a whole (shopping engines, agencies, etc.) are not eligible for product ratings.
• If a merchant collects reviews for its subsidiaries, and it is not possible to assign review ownership to individual subsidiaries, then the merchant may send us a single review feed that covers all of its subsidiaries so that they become eligible for product ratings. Please notify Google if this applies to you by emailing review-partnerships@google.com.