Star Rating
A star rating is the 1-to-5 summary of customer sentiment for a product, usually shown as an average of every individual review score so a shopper can read overall quality at a glance without opening each review.
The number is formed by averaging the scores customers leave, so a product with reviews of 5, 4, 5, and 3 carries an average of 4.25, typically rounded to the nearest half star for display. Because it compresses many opinions into one figure, the count behind it matters as much as the figure itself: 4.6 across 200 reviews carries far more weight than 5.0 across two.
A perfect all-5 average can read as less trustworthy, not more. Shoppers have learned that a spotless score often signals too few reviews, filtered feedback, or incentivised ratings, so a 4.5 to 4.8 spread with visible critical reviews usually converts better than an untouched 5.0. Honesty in the distribution is part of the signal.
To make a star rating readable by search engines and AI assistants, it needs to be expressed in structured data, not just drawn as filled glyphs in the page. Marking up the average value and review count with AggregateRating schema is what lets a rich snippet show stars in results and lets an AI answer cite your score. Getting existing ratings rendered this way, corroborated, and citable is the gap BetterReviews closes.