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Google Ads seller ratings: why most shops with reviews get no stars

19 October 2026 · JustReview

Google Ads seller ratings, which Google now calls store ratings, are the stars and review count that can appear under a Search text ad. Google shows them only when it holds enough reviews of your shop from the last 24 months in that country, typically around 100, collected through Google Customer Reviews or one of its approved review partners, and only when the composite rating is 3.5 or higher. Reviews on your Google Business Profile, Amazon, eBay or any other marketplace do not count. That last rule is where most shops fall short: of the 77 shop accounts in our database that received 100 or more reviews in the past 24 months, only 6 got that many from a source Google uses.

We read Google’s help pages on 19 October 2026, counted where every shop account in our production database actually gets its reviews, and then asked Google directly, through its own store rating lookup, which of our live shops have a rating. Here is what qualifies, what does not, and how to find out where you stand.

The rules as Google states them in October 2026

Most guides still repeat “100 reviews in 12 months, 3.5 stars”. Google’s own help page has moved on in several places, and the differences decide whether you qualify:

Store ratings are an automated asset. You cannot add them to a campaign, you do not pay for them, and clicks on an ad that carries them cost the same as any other click. Google says, citing its own internal data, that they improve click-through rate on Search text ads by 2% on average. You can see how they perform in the account-level automated assets report, and you can switch them off, which almost nobody has a reason to do.

Two of the rules above quietly decide most cases. The country rule means a shop selling across Europe needs enough reviews in each market separately; a strong Dutch rating does nothing for the German ads. The source rule means a shop can be drowning in reviews and still have nothing Google will use.

Which reviews count and which do not

Google builds a store rating from three inputs: Google Customer Reviews, the free post-purchase survey run through Merchant Center; a list of 29 independent review sites it calls supported review partners; and its own research into the shopping experience a site provides. The partner list includes Trusted Shops, Reviews.io, Feefo, Yotpo, Bazaarvoice, Shopper Approved, Okendo, Stamped.io and SmartCustomer, the renamed Sitejabber. Google adds only one or two new partners a year, so this list is stable.

The last row trips people up most often. Marking up reviews on your own pages can earn stars in organic results when the rules for that are met, which we cover in our guide to review schema and stars in Google. It has no effect on the stars under a paid Search ad.

What our data shows: the reviews exist, in the wrong places

To see how this plays out for real shops, we took every account in our production database that has connected at least one shopping source: Google Shopping, Trusted Shops, Reviews.io, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Allegro, AliExpress or Walmart. That is 267 accounts once our own internal accounts are removed. We then counted every review they received, from any source, dated in the 24 months to 19 October 2026.

One review in thirty landed somewhere Google reads for store ratings. Per account the picture is sharper. 125 of the 267 accounts received at least one review in the window and 77 received 100 or more, with a median of 471 each. For 68 of those 77, marketplaces alone cleared 100. Yet the median number of reviews those 77 shops collected in a source Google uses was zero: 67 of them had none at all, and only 10 had ever connected such a source.

The switch from 12 to 24 months helps at the margin, two extra shops in our sample, but it does not change the shape. The bottleneck is not the volume of reviews or the time window, it is where the reviews are collected.

There is a second, quieter finding. 45 accounts have connected a source Google uses, and only 22 of them received a single review from it in the last 24 months. Shops sign up for a review programme, collect for a while and then stop. Their store rating then runs out with the 24-month window, while the old reviews sit on the partner’s site looking healthy.

The limit of this method is obvious: we only see the sources a shop connected to us. A shop could run Google Customer Reviews and never tell us. So we asked Google.

We checked Google’s own lookup for 59 live shops

Google publishes a store rating page for any domain, and you can change the country in the address. On 19 October 2026 we checked 68 domains belonging to the 59 shop accounts whose review widget was live on their own website in the last 90 days, in the country of the domain plus the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Poland, 277 lookups in total.

The 22 shops with plenty of reviews and no stars are the clearest result. Between them they had a median of 669 reviews in two years, 98.8% of those reviews came from marketplaces, and not one came from a source Google uses. Volume was never their problem. Every shop in the sample that collected 100 or more reviews in a Google-used source, four of them, had a rating.

The second result corrects the usual advice. Google showed 26 country ratings across the 17 rated shops, and 16 of those were built on fewer than 100 reviews. The smallest was a 5.0 rating from 10 reviews in the United Kingdom. Google’s own wording, that most merchants get a rating at about 100, describes a typical case, not a gate, so a small shop that collects through the right channel can get stars long before it reaches three figures.

Three smaller observations are worth knowing. Eight of the 17 rated shops sent us no review from a Google-used source in the last 24 months, which means they collect through Google Customer Reviews or a partner directly, and that route works whether or not anything else sees it. Ratings were almost always local: 13 of the 17 had one in a single country only. And every rating we found sat between 4.1 and 5.0, so the 3.5 floor kept nobody off. Two US shops even carried Google’s Top Quality Store badge while showing “No rating yet”, which tells you the badge and the rating are separate things.

Product ratings in Shopping ads are a different programme

Product ratings are the stars under an individual item in Shopping ads and free product listings. They come from a separate product review feed in Merchant Center, sent by you or by a review aggregator, and Google’s Merchant Center help says you need at least 50 reviews across all your products, with the feed updated at least once a month. Products need identifiers such as GTINs so reviews can be matched.

Connecting Google Customer Reviews does not get you there on its own. Of the 16,407 Google Shopping reviews in our database today, not one is attached to a product: every single one rates the shop. We looked at what that means for your own pages in our guide to showing Google Shopping seller ratings on a website.

How to check whether you have a store rating

1. Open https://www.google.com/shopping/ratings/account/lookup?q=yourshop.com, using your homepage domain. Google redirects to a store page.
2. Look for the rating near the top. “No rating yet” means Google has nothing it will show.
3. Change the c= parameter in the address to each country you advertise in: c=GB, c=DE, c=US. Ratings are calculated per country, and a rating in one tells you nothing about another.
4. Repeat for every domain your ads point to. A .de and a .com are separate shops to Google.
5. If you do have a rating and your ads still show no stars, check the score is 3.5 or higher and the visible URL of the ad uses the rated domain. Auction conditions can still keep them off an individual impression.

Our own domain is a useful example of a “No rating yet”. We sell software, the reviews about us are a few dozen spread over several sites, and when we tested asking our own customers for reviews, 78 requests produced six to eight reviews. That is nowhere near enough in any one country, and the lookup says so.

What to do when your ads show no stars

1. Route post-purchase requests to a source Google uses. Google Customer Reviews is free in Merchant Center. If you already pay for a listed partner, make sure its invitation goes out after every order on your own domain, not only for marketplace orders.
2. Count per country. If you sell in four markets, you need four healthy streams of reviews, not one big one.
3. Watch for silent stops. Half the partner connections in our data received nothing in two years. Check the date of your most recent review, not the total.
4. Keep marketplace reviews working elsewhere. They will never feed your ad stars, but they are genuine evidence and they belong on your own site, where a shopper is deciding.
5. Do not buy your way to 100. Google filters reviews it does not trust, and paid reviews carry legal risk on top, as we explain in why buying reviews is a trap.

Where we fit

Your ad stars come from a short list of sources, but your shoppers do not care where a review was written. That is the gap we fill. JustReview pulls the reviews you already have, from Amazon, eBay, Allegro, Etsy, Google Business Profile, Google Shopping, Trusted Shops and Reviews.io, into one widget on your own pages, so the 96% of reviews that never reach your ads still do their job at the moment of purchase. For Google Shopping we default to a rating summary, which suits a feed of short shop-level ratings; the setup and embed code are on our Google Shopping reviews widget page, and plans are on the pricing page. You can create an account and connect your sources to see what each one has collected in the last 24 months.

To be clear about the limits: JustReview is not one of Google’s store rating partners, and nothing we do puts stars under your ads. If those stars are the goal, the fix is the collection step above, and a widget is what makes the rest of your reviews count on your own site in the meantime.