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.
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
Left by anyone on your Business Profile. They drive local search and appear in Maps.
Google Customer Reviews
A Merchant Center programme that surveys buyers after an order and feeds seller ratings into Shopping ads. Opt-in, ecommerce only.
Why Shopify merchants hit both
Searches for “google customer reviews shopify” split roughly evenly between the two, and the answers are completely different.
Which the widget shows
Business Profile reviews. Customer Reviews cannot be collected automatically — manual entry is the workaround.
How to tell which you have
If Google emailed your buyers a survey after their order and the result feeds a seller rating in Shopping ads, that is Customer Reviews. If the reviews appear on your Maps listing and anyone can leave one, that is a Business Profile. A store can have both, doing different jobs in different places, and the one worth building depends on whether you run Shopping ads at all.
Read the full version
The full comparison is in Google Customer Reviews vs Google reviews.
Questions
More from the blog
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 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.