One recipe site merged 4,000 duplicate ratings into Recipe schema — 31% click lift in 6 weeks

One recipe site merged 4,000 duplicate ratings into Recipe schema — 31% click lift in 6 weeks
A mid-size food publisher we've been tracking had aggregateRating firing on 4,100 recipe pages, but the review counts were split across three plugins emitting conflicting JSON-LD. Google was averaging the lowest count, so stars showed on barely 600 URLs. As of this week the fix is in: they consolidated to a single Recipe node with one canonical aggregateRating, killed the duplicate microdata, and resubmitted via the inspection tool.
— Star eligibility jumped from 600 to 3,900 pages in 41 days
— Recipe-result clicks up 31% per Search Console
What it means for you: duplicate rating nodes don't average up, they collapse down. Audit for more than one aggregateRating per page before you blame the algorithm. Watch this: count consolidation is the cheapest star win nobody runs.