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Reviews glossary

Sixteen terms from this space, defined once and defined properly.

What is here

Sixteen terms, each with a definition in the first two sentences, a real example, and links to the neighbouring terms rather than a restatement of them.

Several of them exist because the industry uses them loosely — review gating, first-party reviews and testimonial versus review are all worth getting right.

Browse

Every page in this section, with the rest linked from each one.

Social proof

Social proof is the tendency to judge something by how other people have judged it.

User-generated content (UGC)

User-generated content is any content about a brand created by its customers rather than by the brand: reviews, photos, videos, comments, forum posts, social media mentions..

Testimonial vs review

A review is unsolicited feedback left on a platform you do not control, alongside everyone else’s including the critical ones.

Aggregate rating

An aggregate rating is the average score across all reviews of something, together with how many reviews it came from.

Review velocity

Review velocity is the rate at which a business receives new reviews — how many arrive per week or month, rather than how many exist in total..

Verified review

A verified review is one the platform can tie to a real transaction — a confirmed purchase, a completed booking, a finished job..

Review syndication

Review syndication is the distribution of reviews from where they were collected to other places they can appear — a retailer’s site, a comparison engine, Google Shopping..

Google Place ID

The unique identifier Google assigns to a place. Find yours below.

Google Business Profile

A Google Business Profile is the free listing a business has on Google Search and Maps — name, hours, photos, and the reviews customers leave..

Rich results and rich snippets

Rich results are search results enhanced with extra detail pulled from structured data on the page — star ratings, prices, images, FAQs, recipe times..

Review gating

Review gating is the practice of filtering who is asked to leave a public review, so that satisfied customers are invited and unhappy ones are not..

Reputation management

Reputation management is the practice of monitoring and influencing what is publicly said about a business — reviews, search results, press and social mentions..

NPS, CSAT and CES

NPS, CSAT and CES are survey metrics for measuring customer sentiment.

Why a glossary at all

Start with what a review widget is if the whole category is new. Beyond that: the industry uses several of these terms loosely, and the looseness causes real mistakes — businesses that think filtering changes their rating, or that a testimonial and a review are the same thing, or that gating means one specific practice when it is used for two.

Each entry is deliberately short. If a term needs more than 400 words it has a reference page instead.

How to use it

Definitions are in the first two sentences of each page, with neighbouring terms linked rather than restated.

Questions