Do AggregateRatings counts in Recipes need to be in Review markup?

Question

If you look at the recipe rich result documentation for aggregateRating, it says to

Follow the Review snippet guidelines and list of required and recommended AggregateRating properties.

Common practice, however, is that the actual reviews are not in the JSON-LD schema at all. Most often, they are tied to a comment that has a name and the rating.

Additionally, I see many sites that allow single click ratings. So, the aggregate ratings do reflect them and the aggregate is shown on the page, but there is no individual and unique rating on the page.

I current common practice wrong or correct? Is there an optimal practice that is outside of current common practice? Are single click reviews (without an author) ok to add to the aggregateRating?

Answer 1

You tell us:

Common practice, however, is that the actual reviews are not in the JSON-LD schema at all. Most often, they are tied to a comment that has a name and the rating.

It is quite the controversial statement. If you check your Google Guide for Reviews, then you can find many examples of structured data using JSON-LD. E.g.:

{
  "@context": "http://schema.org/",
  "@type": "Product",
  "image": "http://www.example.com/catcher-in-the-rye-book-cover.jpg",
  "name": "The Catcher in the Rye",
  "**review**": {
    "@type": "**Review**",
    "**reviewRating**": {
      "@type": "Rating",
      "ratingValue": "5"
    },
    "name": "A masterpiece of literature",
    "author": {
      "@type": "Person",
      "name": "John Doe"
    },
    "datePublished": "2006-05-04",
    "reviewBody": "I really enjoyed this book. It captures the essential challenge people face as they try make sense of their lives and grow to adulthood.",
    "publisher": {
      "@type": "Organization",
      "name": "Washington Times"
    }
  }
}

Here you can see the obvious elements of the markup for Review, but not a comment, such as:

• review
• @type": "Review"
• reviewRating
• reviewBody

If you mean critical reviews, then this is also in the specified Google guide as Critic review.