Review stars disappeared from healthcare pages in Google Search since May

A healthcare site that still ships valid Review schema is paying for markup Google is not using. Andrea Badder at Schema App reports a drop in review snippet visibility across the agency's healthcare clients that began in late May, with a second drop in early August for some organisations. Barry Schwartz wrote the finding up at Search Engine Roundtable on 7 October.

What Schema App observed

Review snippets are the star rating and the one-line excerpt that Google used to show in the organic result when a page carried Review or AggregateRating schema. Badder's post says: "Across our healthcare customers, we've observed a drop in Review Snippet visibility since late May, with another drop occurring in early August for some organizations."

The agency tried the usual recovery steps. Badder writes that "testing different ways of connecting aggregateRating, alternative property paths, and multi-typing healthcare entities with Product did not restore Review Snippet performance." The clients then decided to keep the markup accurate rather than rewrite it to chase the rich result back: "Their priority was ensuring their markup continued to accurately represent their physicians, locations, services, specialties, and relationships."

What Google has and has not said

Schwartz notes that he does not see review snippets in his own doctor and dentist searches outside the local results. He suggests Google may have turned the feature off for the medical sector in general. Google has not published a statement, and this item has not seen one. Google has disabled rich results for a sector before, so a quiet switch is in keeping with how changes of this kind have arrived.

What this changes for an SEO plan

Review schema on a healthcare page remains legal, remains valid, and still describes the practice correctly for an answer engine that reads the structured data. What it no longer does, on the evidence Schema App has, is put a star in the Google result.

That has three immediate consequences for a plan written in July or August. A line item that promises review stars in Google Search as the outcome of adding Review markup to a healthcare site is now wrong, and the client should hear so. A test that measures the plan on rich result rate will show a decline that no on-page change can recover. And a priority list that ranks adding Review markup above other work for a healthcare site should be redrawn, because the markup is now worth adding for schema accuracy and for other engines, rather than for a visible Google result.

For a reader on a non-healthcare site, this is the second time in six months that Google has quietly cut a review-adjacent feature from a vertical, and the pattern is worth remembering the next time Review markup is promised in a scope.

Source

Google Drops Review Snippets For Healthcare Web Pages, Search Engine Roundtable, Barry Schwartz. Healthcare Review Snippets Have Dropped: Here's Why We're Not Worried, Schema App, Andrea Badder.