What is here
Short pieces, usually pointing at a longer reference page in Learn, which is where anything that needs maintaining lives.
That split is deliberate: articles are dated and stay as written, reference pages are kept current.
Blog
Shorter pieces on reviews, policy and what changed. The reference versions live in Learn.
Browse
Every page in this section, with the rest linked from each one.
How to get more Google reviews without breaking Google’s policy
Most of the gap between businesses that get reviews and those that do not is timing and friction, not persuasion.
Review schema markup: how to get stars in Google search results
Why so many businesses add review markup and never see a star, and which schema type still works.
What the 2026 review statistics actually say
Most review statistics you will find are unsourced or a decade old. Here is what the current research says, and where it comes from.
Google Customer Reviews vs Google Reviews: which one is on your Shopify store?
Two Google products with almost the same name, and the Shopify merchants who end up with the wrong one.
Google Reviews API and Places API: what you can and can’t pull
What the Places API actually returns, what the Business Profile API does instead, and when building your own is a mistake.
Do review widgets slow your site down? We measured 9 of them
Which Core Web Vital a third-party widget actually affects, and why it is usually not the thing making your page slow.
Review gating and the FTC rules every SMB gets wrong
What the 2024 FTC rule covers, what it does not, and the thing small businesses get wrong about gating.
The split between blog and Learn
Posts here are dated and stay as written. Reference pages in Learn are maintained, because platform policy and Google behaviour change and a stale reference page does real damage.
So a post usually summarises and points at the reference version. If you want the current answer, follow the link.
What we write about
Things we had to work out ourselves: how the platforms actually behave, what the rules say, and what the data shows when you check the primary source rather than the article quoting it.