---
title: "AggregateRating Schema for Local SEO | Lighthouse Local"
description: "AggregateRating schema is the star-rating markup for your business. Here's how it works, why your own stars might not show in Google, and how to write one."
source: "https://www.lighthouselocal.ai/blog/aggregate-rating-schema"
---
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# AggregateRating Schema, and Why Your Star Ratings Might Not Show
[Saihajpreet Singh Co-Founder, Lighthouse Local](https://www.lighthouselocal.ai/blog/authors/saihajpreet-singh) August 30, 2026 • 7 min read
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## The Rating Behind the Stars
Most schema markup labels a plain fact, your name, your address, your hours. AggregateRating labels a verdict. It's the small block that says your business earned, say, 4.9 stars across 213 reviews, and it hands that summary to a machine as one tidy number instead of a paragraph it has to add up.
One thing to get straight early. AggregateRating is never a standalone thing. It's a value that lives inside a parent, most often your [LocalBusiness schema](https://www.lighthouselocal.ai/blog/what-is-local-schema-markup), sometimes a product or a service. Schema.org, the vocabulary search engines read from, [defines it plainly](https://schema.org/AggregateRating) as the average rating based on multiple ratings or reviews. You attach it to the thing being rated, and it carries the score.
## The Handful of Numbers Inside It
Open one up and it's short. A rating, a count, and a scale, that's the core of it. Here's what each field holds.
- **ratingValue** is your average score, like 4.9. It can be a number, a fraction, or a percentage.
- **reviewCount** is how many written reviews stand behind it. **ratingCount** is the wider tally of all ratings, including the ones left with no words. Google wants at least one of the two.
- **bestRating** and **worstRating** set the scale. Leave them off and a 1 to 5 scale is assumed, which is what most people want anyway.
- **itemReviewed** names the thing being rated, so its name has to be there.
Worth a clear line here. Schema.org marks none of these as required, it only defines what they mean. The required list comes from Google, and it's the shortlist for a shot at star treatment, a rating value, a count, and the name of what's rated. [Google's review snippet guidelines](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/review-snippet), updated as recently as July 2026, spell it out. Written as JSON-LD and nested in your business, a filled-in block looks like the one below.
## Why Your Own Stars Won't Show in Google
Here's the part most guides skip, and it's the one that saves you a headache. You can mark up your 4.9 stars perfectly and still see no stars next to your listing in Google. On purpose.
Google still spells this out in its current guidelines. A business that controls the reviews about itself doesn't get the star treatment on its own LocalBusiness pages. Rate yourself on your own site, whether straight in your markup or through an embedded reviews widget, and Google calls it self-serving and holds the stars back. And yes, this covers AggregateRating, not just individual reviews. The rule is narrow but firm, the reviews have to be about you, sitting on your site, under your control.
So where do the stars a customer sees actually come from? A different system entirely, your [Google Business Profile](https://support.google.com/business/answer/4801187), where Google averages the ratings people leave you and shows the result in Search and Maps. That number isn't touched by the self-serving rule, and it isn't something your on-page markup can produce. Two separate machines, and only one of them prints stars from your own code.
## The Reason to Add It Anyway
If it won't earn you stars, why bother? Two honest reasons.
First, it's a clean, machine-readable statement of your standing. Labeled data reads as a plain fact, not a pitch, so any tool that parses your page, from a scraper to a search engine to whatever reads the web on an assistant's behalf, can lift your rating straight off it without doing math on your testimonials. You're stating your credibility in the one format machines rarely misread. Whether that tips a specific answer your way is something no one can promise, but the business a machine can read without guessing is seldom the one it skips when [AI decides who to recommend](https://www.lighthouselocal.ai/blog/how-to-get-your-business-recommended-by-ai).
Second, the block only loses its stars on LocalBusiness and Organization. Mark up a real product you sell, or a service with genuine reviews shown on the page, and that same aggregate rating is fully eligible for stars, no self-serving problem. The catch is specific, not a blanket ban. Keep it honest, keep the number visible on the page, and it earns its place.
## Writing One That Holds Up
Ready to add it? The markup is a few lines, and the rules that keep it valid are mostly common sense.
Nest an aggregateRating block inside your LocalBusiness, give it a ratingValue and a reviewCount or ratingCount, and the required part is done. Here's the block to drop in.
Copy
```
"aggregateRating": {
"@type": "AggregateRating",
"ratingValue": "4.9",
"reviewCount": "213",
"bestRating": "5"
}
```
The habits that keep it honest matter more than the syntax.
- Use real numbers that match the reviews a visitor can actually see on the page. Google's guideline is blunt, the rating has to be visible where you claim it.
- Source the ratings from real customers, not a figure you picked because it looked good.
- Don't pool in ratings scraped from other sites and pass them off as your own.
You don't have to hand-write it either. Describe your rating to an AI assistant, have it draft the block and show you where it goes on your platform, then confirm the reviews it points to are genuinely on the page, because a rating is only as trustworthy as [the reviews underneath it](https://www.lighthouselocal.ai/blog/how-reviews-shape-ai-recommendations).
## Mark the Rating, Then Watch the Answer
So mark up your rating, honestly and visibly. Just know what it does and doesn't buy you. It states your standing in a form machines read cleanly, and on a genuine product or service it can still earn stars. What it won't do on its own is hang gold stars on your local listing, that job belongs to your Google Business Profile and the real reviews behind it.
And even flawless markup can't answer the question that actually moves revenue, which is whether an assistant sends the next customer to you or to a competitor. That plays out in conversations you never get to see. Watching that gap is a job for Lighthouse Local's [AI visibility tracker](https://www.lighthouselocal.ai/how-it-works). It asks your real customer questions across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI on a repeating cycle and shows you, name by name, who each assistant recommends. Once your markup ships, run our [free AI visibility audit](https://audits.lighthouselocal.ai/?utm_source=lighthouselocal&utm_medium=marketing-site&utm_campaign=blog-aggregate-rating-schema&utm_content=post-body) too. It reads your pages the way a model does and points to the weak spots first, start to finish in under a minute, no signup. When you want the whole picture handled for you, [Lighthouse Local for Business](https://www.lighthouselocal.ai/for-business) keeps the watch. So mark up your rating, honestly and in plain sight, then watch the answer, because the name an assistant gives is the only rating that moves a customer to call.
## Frequently asked questions
### Will AggregateRating schema get me star ratings in Google?
Usually not on your own business pages. Google treats a rating you publish about yourself as self-serving and holds back the star feature on LocalBusiness and Organization markup. The stars customers see come from your Google Business Profile, a separate system. The same markup can still earn stars on a genuine product or service you sell.
### What's the difference between ratingCount and reviewCount?
reviewCount is the number of written reviews behind your score. ratingCount is the wider tally of all ratings, including the ones left with no words. Google asks for at least one of the two, and you can include both.
### Where do my Google stars actually come from?
Your Google Business Profile. Google averages the ratings people leave your profile and shows that score in Search and Maps. Your own on-page markup doesn't produce those stars, and the self-serving rule doesn't touch your profile score.
### Is AggregateRating markup still worth adding?
Yes, if you keep it honest. It states your rating in a form any machine can read straight off the page, it stays eligible for stars on real products and services, and it costs you a few lines. Just make sure the number is real and visible on the page.
## Mentioned in this guide
[What is local schema markup](https://www.lighthouselocal.ai/blog/what-is-local-schema-markup) [How reviews shape AI recommendations](https://www.lighthouselocal.ai/blog/how-reviews-shape-ai-recommendations) [Lighthouse Local for Business](https://www.lighthouselocal.ai/for-business)
### Table of contents
[The Rating Behind the Stars](#the-rating-behind-the-stars) [The Handful of Numbers Inside It](#the-handful-of-numbers-inside-it) [Why Your Own Stars Won't Show in Google](#why-your-own-stars-won-t-show-in-google) [The Reason to Add It Anyway](#the-reason-to-add-it-anyway) [Writing One That Holds Up](#writing-one-that-holds-up) [Mark the Rating, Then Watch the Answer](#mark-the-rating-then-watch-the-answer) [Frequently asked questions](#faq)
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