How to add reviews to a website: three routes and the rules

You have reviews. They sit on Google, maybe on a review site, and the people who land on your website never see them. Most guides to adding reviews to a website are one vendor's help article: a click path through a single builder's or tool's editor, a widget vendor's instructions, or a long guide for one shop platform. Few tell you which route to pick, what the rules let you show, or where on the page a review does any work. This post does.

There are three ways to add reviews to your website, and each has a cost the others do not. Pick the route first, then place the reviews where a visitor is deciding, then keep the page inside two sets of rules: the FTC's rule on fake and suppressed reviews, and Google's guidelines on review markup. One thing before any of it: this post states the rules as published and is not legal advice.

Three ways to add reviews to your website, and what each costs

A site builder's or site tool's help article describes the same job every time: open the editor and add each review to the site's reviews section, sometimes after picking a layout. That is route one. Guides to adding Google reviews to a website describe a widget that pulls your Google reviews into a feed and gives you an embed code. That is route two. Route three is the oldest, and one shop platform's guide calls it adding reviews manually: copy the review into your page as text, with the reviewer's name, the date and a link to where it was left.

Three things decide between them, and the table above shows only one.

A builder section or a hand-copied quotation outlives any tool. If the widget vendor shuts down, raises its price or loses its Google connection, the feed goes blank and your page shows an empty box until you notice. Text you typed in stays.

Only the embedded feed updates itself. If you collect two or three reviews a week, typing each one in is a chore you will stop doing by spring, and the section stays the size it was the day you built it while the profile keeps growing. A feed solves that; so does updating the section on the first of each month.

A feed adds someone else's script to your page. That is JavaScript loading from a third party on every visit: normal, how most embedded content works, and still a small cost in page speed and a dependency you should know is there.

The tools that offer the feed are the same ones that send review requests and monitor your profiles; "website review widgets" is one of the twenty rows every product on the reputation and review management listing is compared on, so that page tells you which of them include it.

Can I use Google reviews on my website?

Yes, and there are two different things people mean by it.

Linking to your Google reviews costs nothing. Google Business Profile gives you a link customers can visit to leave a review (its help page says "you can ask customers to visit a Google link or scan a QR code"), and the same profile page is where your reviews live. A button on your site that says "Read our reviews on Google" and goes to your profile is the simplest honest version of this: it sends the visitor to every review, not a selection, so nothing about it can misrepresent anything.

Showing Google reviews on your page is route two or route three above. A widget tool does it with a feed, in three steps: collect and moderate, pick a layout (wall, grid, carousel or slideshow), then add the embed code to any website. By hand, you copy the review text and credit it.

Either way, copy the review as the customer wrote it. Trimming a long one to its first two sentences is fine if you mark the cut; rewriting it is not, because then it is no longer the customer's review.

The HTML for a hand-copied review

People add the word HTML to this search and few guides answer it, so here it is. A review copied by hand is a quotation with a source, and HTML has an element for exactly that. Paste this into a code or HTML block in your builder, or straight into the page:

<blockquote>
  <p>Fixed the boiler the same afternoon and left the kitchen cleaner
  than they found it. Second time we have used them.</p>
  <footer>
    Priya, March 2026, via
    <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/place/...">Google reviews</a>
  </footer>
</blockquote>

Three parts, and each does a job. The <p> holds the review as written. The <footer> names the reviewer the way the platform shows them (first name is usually what you have; do not invent a surname), gives the month, and links to the original. The link is the part people skip, and it is the part that matters: it lets a sceptical visitor check that the review exists, and it is the plainest way to show your selection is a selection.

Do not wrap this in Review or AggregateRating structured data. The next section says why.

What you may and may not show: the FTC rule and Google's guidelines

Two sets of rules reach a review on your own site. One is law in the United States; the other is Google's condition for showing stars in search results. Both are stated here as published, and neither of us is your lawyer.

The FTC's rule on fake reviews and testimonials. The Federal Trade Commission announced its final rule on 14 August 2024, in force 60 days after its publication in the Federal Register. As the FTC's own release describes it, the rule bans:

• creating, buying or selling reviews that misrepresent they are by someone who does not exist (the release names AI-generated fakes) or by someone with no real experience of the product;
• "providing compensation or other incentives conditioned on the writing of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, either positive or negative";
• reviews by officers and managers that do not clearly disclose their connection to the business;
• claiming a website the business controls provides "independent reviews or opinions" about a category of products or services;
• using "unfounded or groundless legal threats, physical threats, intimidation, or certain false public accusations to prevent or remove a negative consumer review", and misrepresenting that the reviews displayed "represent all or most of the reviews submitted";
• buying or selling fake social media indicators where the buyer knew or should have known they were fake.

Read the last-but-one line again, because it is the one that touches a reviews page. The release describes a ban on misrepresenting, not a duty to publish every review you have ever received. You may show a selection. What you may not do is present that selection as all of them, or as most of them, while the negative ones were kept off. The practical cure is cheap: label the section honestly ("A selection of our Google reviews"), and link to the full set.

Here is how that plays out. Suppose you run a physiotherapy clinic with 38 reviews on your Google profile, 31 of them five stars, three of them two stars. You want six on your home page. Pick six real ones, show them with names and dates, head the section "Some of our Google reviews", and put the link to all 38 under it. A visitor who clicks sees the three two-star reviews, and your replies to them, and nothing on your page claimed otherwise. Head the same section "What every patient says about us" with the link left out, and you have the problem the rule describes. (The numbers are made up for the example.)

Google Business Profile's policy. Google's help page for getting more reviews says that offering incentives, "like free or discounted goods or services, in exchange for customers to post reviews, change reviews, or remove negative reviews", is considered fake and misleading content and is strictly prohibited. So a discount for a review is out on Google whatever its sentiment; the FTC rule bans the version conditioned on sentiment anywhere. Our post on whether it is legal to pay for reviews takes this further.

Google's review-snippet guidelines (last updated 8 September 2026) govern what you may mark up as structured data, which is what produces the stars under a result in search. Three lines settle what a small business site may do:

• "Don't aggregate reviews or ratings from other websites." Reviews you copied from Google or a review site, by hand or by feed, must not feed Review or AggregateRating markup on your page.
• "If the entity that's being reviewed controls the reviews about itself", pages using LocalBusiness or any other Organization structured data are "ineligible for star review feature". Reviews of your business, on your site, under your control, are that case. Markup will not earn you stars for your own business page.
• "Ratings must be sourced directly from users", and the marked-up review text and rating must be visible on the page. No hidden markup, no invented ratings.

So showing reviews on your page helps the visitor who is already there; it does not add stars to your search result, because Google's guidelines make a page where the business controls the reviews about itself ineligible for the star feature. Do reviews help SEO? covers what reviews do and do not do for ranking.

Where on the page a review earns its place

A review does its work where a visitor is weighing a decision, so put it there rather than in a block at the foot of the home page where nothing is decided.

1. Next to the price, the quote button or the booking form. One or two short reviews beside the thing that asks for commitment: a trades firm beside "Request a quote", a shop on the product page below the price, a clinic on the booking page.
2. On the service page it is about. "Fixed the boiler the same afternoon" belongs on the heating page, where it is worth five "great service" quotes anywhere else.
3. A reviews page of its own, with every review you choose to show, the honest label, and the link to the full set on each platform. It is where the "Read our reviews" link in your menu lands.
4. Near the top of the home page, one or two, no more. The first screen is for what you do and who for.
5. In the checkout or enquiry flow, one line, because a visitor halfway through a form is the one most likely to leave.

If you would rather know where visitors hesitate than guess, a heatmap and session recording tool shows where they stop scrolling and which button they hover over and do not press. That is where the review goes.

What a review on your site will not do: rescue a service people did not like. Six selected five-star quotes above a Google profile averaging far less read as the gap they are, and the link to the full set (which you should include) shows it. Fix the thing the two-star reviews describe first. Why reviews matter to a business sets out what they change and what they do not.

The order to do it in

1. Pick the reviews. Real ones, as written, from the platform where they were left. Not one from a director or manager of the business without saying so; not one you wrote; not one you traded a discount for.
2. Choose the route. A builder section or a hand-copied quotation if you get a few reviews a month and want nothing to break; an embedded feed if you get them weekly and will not keep a section current by hand.
3. Place them by the decision. Price, quote button, booking form, the service page the review is about.
4. Label the selection and link to the full set. "Some of our Google reviews" and a link to the profile: the sentence that keeps a selection inside the FTC's rule.
5. Keep the markup honest. No Review or AggregateRating structured data built from reviews you copied or pulled from another site, and no expectation of stars for your own business page.

Then a monthly check that the section still matches the profile and that the feed, if you use one, is still loading.

The next step

Reviews on your site only work if there are reviews to show, and most of them live on platforms where your customers already are. The reputation and review management listing shows which tools collect them, monitor them and offer the website widget this post describes: start there if the embedded feed is your route.