Healthcare web pages appear to have lost review snippets — the star ratings shown in Google Search results — in a change first observed in late May 2025, with a second drop hitting some organizations in early August.

Andrea Badder at Schema App documented the shift using Google Search Console's performance report filtered by search appearance. "Across our healthcare customers, we've observed a drop in Review Snippet visibility since late May, with another drop occurring in early August for some organizations," she wrote.

The change has not been confirmed by Google. The evidence is entirely tool-based: Search Console appearance data from Schema App's healthcare customers, plus manual searches that no longer surface stars for doctors, dentists and similar medical queries outside of local results.

What is a review snippet?

A review snippet is a short excerpt of a review or rating, usually an average of combined scores from many reviewers. In Google Search, it renders as star ratings beneath a page's title. Sites earn the display by adding review schema — structured data such as aggregateRating — to their pages.

What did Schema App test?

Badder's Customer Success team investigated whether the markup implementation itself caused the decline. She wrote:

Testing different ways of connecting aggregateRating, alternative property paths, and multi-typing healthcare entities with Product did not restore Review Snippet performance.

That means the loss is not a technical schema error on the affected sites. Multiple valid implementations all failed to bring the rich result back — a strong tool-level signal that Google itself stopped awarding the feature for this vertical.

How did healthcare site owners react?

According to Badder, many customers chose not to chase the stars at all. While some were open to further testing, many weren't interested in changing semantically accurate Schema Markup simply to try to recover the rich result. Their priority, she wrote, was ensuring the markup "continued to accurately represent their physicians, locations, services, specialties, and relationships for search engines and AI systems."

Badder framed the takeaway as strategic rather than tactical:

Rich results are still valuable when Google awards them. But earning a particular rich result is becoming a smaller part of what an advanced Schema Markup strategy needs to accomplish.

She added: "For healthcare organizations especially, accurately defining your organization for machines is the utmost priority."

Is this a deliberate Google policy?

Google has a documented history of turning off support for select rich result types, and even for entire industries. That precedent makes an intentional restriction for the medical space plausible — but Google has issued no statement confirming one.

The original report raises the open question directly: did Google decide to turn review snippets off for the medical space entirely? Independent spot checks for doctors, dentists and related queries found no stars outside of local results, consistent with a vertical-wide change rather than site-by-site enforcement.

What should site owners monitor next?

Healthcare publishers should watch their Search Console search-appearance reports for any further drops or recoveries, and watch for an official Google statement on rich result eligibility for the medical vertical. For now, no markup fix has been shown to restore the stars.