<b>The AggregateRating honesty trap in review tools</b>
Gotcha-first this time, because it's the one that gets sites manual actions.
Many review-schema tools let you type any rating value and review count by hand. That's the trap.
The rule everyone forgets:
— AggregateRating must reflect ratings genuinely collected from users or a real editorial scoring system
— Hard-coding "4.8 from 312 reviews" with no actual reviews behind it is fabricated structured data, a spam-policy violation
Who's at risk:
— Anyone using a plugin's "set rating manually" field to invent social proof
Who's safe:
— Sites with a real user-rating widget or a documented editorial rubric feeding the number
What to demand from any review-schema tool:
— It should pull the aggregate from actual collected ratings, not a free-text box
— Or clearly tie editorialReviewRating to your own reviewer, separate from user AggregateRating
The distinction nobody draws: your reviewer's score is a Review/reviewRating; users' scores are an AggregateRating. Conflating them is both wrong markup and dishonest.
<b>Bottom line:</b> if the tool lets you fake the number freely, that's a liability feature, not a convenience.
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<b>The AggregateRating honesty trap in review tools</b>
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