Review sources
Why your review count on the widget does not match the platform
The most common message we get is some version of “Google says 47, your widget says 40, is something broken.” Usually nothing is broken. The gap comes from one of three mechanisms that change what gets displayed without changing what gets collected: a plan limit that shows only your oldest reviews, a widget’s own language or source filter, or a source platform that never handed us the missing reviews in the first place. We looked at our own production database on 13 September 2026 to put real numbers on how often each one is the actual cause.
The plan limit is the biggest cause, and it is invisible in your dashboard total
Every plan has a ceiling on how many reviews it will display: Free 100, Plus 1,000, Pro 10,000, Ultimate 20,000, counted across all connected sources together. Importing itself never stops. We keep collecting every review your sources publish, on every plan, forever. What the ceiling controls is which of those reviews are shown, and the rule is that the oldest ones stay visible up to your limit. Every review past that point sits in your account, already imported, already counted in your dashboard total, and invisible everywhere else.
| What you see | Where |
|---|---|
| The full count, including reviews above your plan limit | Dashboard total, All reviews |
| Only reviews up to your plan limit, oldest first | Every public widget |
| The gap between the two | Grows every time a new review comes in above the limit |
We measured how many accounts this actually affects right now: 1,186 accounts have plan-limit enforcement active, and together they have 730,049 reviews sitting in the database with the display flag turned off. That is not a hypothetical edge case, it is roughly a fifth of a million reviews per major plan tier that account owners have paid to collect but cannot show without upgrading. The mechanism is deliberate, not a bug: showing the oldest reviews rather than the newest means the visible set stays stable, and a new five-star review does not silently bump an old one-star review out of view.
The quick way to tell if this is your cause: open two different widgets on the same account. If both are capped at the exact same round number, 100 or 1,000, that is the plan limit. A widget count that is off by a handful, or that varies between widgets on the same account, points to one of the other two causes below.
Cross-source deduplication only works within one platform
If you connect both Google and Facebook, or Google and Yelp, to the same account, you might expect the two feeds to be checked against each other so the same customer’s review is not shown twice. That check does not happen, and the reason is a deliberate tradeoff rather than an oversight. Every review we import is keyed on the source platform’s own review ID, scoped to your account and that specific service. That key makes it impossible to double-import the same Google review twice, no matter how many times the sync runs. But Google’s review ID and Facebook’s review ID belong to entirely separate ID spaces. There is no field either platform exposes that reliably proves “this Facebook review and this Google review were written by the same person,” short of matching on the displayed author name, which is unreliable enough (nicknames, shared family accounts, name changes) that we do not use it to silently merge or hide reviews.
The practical effect: if a happy customer reviews you on both Google and Facebook, both reviews are genuine, independently written content, and your widget is correct to show both, even though your review count now looks higher than “one customer, one opinion” would suggest. This is the opposite direction of the plan-limit problem, worth knowing so you do not chase a phantom duplicate-review bug. It also means the count discrepancy question can run two ways: sometimes you see fewer reviews than a single source claims, sometimes your combined total across sources is higher than any one platform shows, because the same person legitimately shows up twice.
A widget’s own filters narrow the count further
Independent of your plan and independent of deduplication, each individual widget you embed has its own settings for which sources, star ratings and languages it is allowed to pull from. The review query behind every widget filters on service and on language before it ever reaches your plan’s display limit. A five-language shop with a widget configured to show only English reviews will see a count well below its true total, and that is by design: the setting exists so a German shop does not have to show a wall of Spanish reviews from marketplace buyers on a page written for local customers. It is one of the most common support questions precisely because the mismatch looks identical to a bug from the outside: fewer reviews than expected, with no error message anywhere.
| Cause | Shows up as | How to tell it apart |
|---|---|---|
| Plan limit | Same round number across every widget | Compare two widgets on the same account |
| Language or source filter | One specific widget lower than the others | Check that widget’s own settings |
| Source’s own time window (e.g. Trusted Shops, 365 days) | Gap that never closes even after upgrading | Confirm against reasons documented for your source |
| Rating with no written text | Dashboard total right, testimonials widget short | Switch the widget’s review type filter |
We keep a fuller breakdown of source-specific time windows, empty-rating imports and sync delay in our troubleshooting doc on review counts, because those causes are specific to each platform’s API rather than to how JustReview displays what it has. Trusted Shops is the cleanest example of a source-side cause: its API only ever returns the last 365 days of reviews, so anything older than that, or anything that happened during a period the connection was broken, is not a display choice on our end. It was never handed to us. If you run Trusted Shops alongside other sources, our guide to embedding Trusted Shops reviews covers what that 365-day window means for your total in more detail.
What to check, in order
When a review count looks wrong, checking causes in the order they are most common saves the most time:
- Compare two different widgets on the same account. If both are capped at the same round number, it is your plan limit. All reviews shows your true total; the pricing page has the per-plan limits if you are deciding whether to upgrade.
- Check the specific widget’s own service and language settings. A count that is low in one place and correct everywhere else is almost never a data problem.
- Confirm the source’s own limitations. Some platforms only ever expose a rolling window of reviews through their API, independent of anything we do.
- Only after ruling out all three, treat a stable gap of dozens or hundreds of reviews against the platform’s stated total as something worth writing in about, since at that point it usually is a connection issue rather than a display rule.
None of these three mechanisms are things a marketing page will tell you about, because none of them make the product look good on their own. But understanding them is the fastest way to stop treating a display rule as a data-loss bug, and if the plan limit turns out to be your actual cause, unlocking the reviews you already collected is a plan change, not a re-import: nothing gets fetched again, the reviews already exist, they just start showing. If you are choosing a reviews widget and want the display rules laid out before you connect anything, see how the Google Reviews widget works and what each plan actually shows.
FAQ
Why does my widget show fewer reviews than my Google or Trusted Shops profile?
Three mechanisms cause this, and they stack. Your plan has a total review limit and shows the oldest reviews up to that number, hiding the rest until you upgrade. A widget's own language and source settings can narrow what it displays further than your account total. And on sources with a strict API window, like Trusted Shops at 365 days, reviews outside that window were never collected at all. Check the plan limit first: if several widgets on the same account all show the same lower number, that is almost always it.
If I connect the same customer's review from two different platforms, does JustReview count it twice?
Yes, and this is correct behavior, not a bug. Deduplication runs on the platform's own review ID scoped to one source, so the same Google review can never be imported twice no matter how often we sync. Across sources there is no shared identity to match on: a Google review and a Facebook review from the same person are two different database rows, because they are two different reviews the person actually wrote.