Average Review Rating Mismatch with Google

@mreed3689 Thanks for letting me know about the review rating mismatch.

This issue does occasionally come up and I’ve covered it a few times in this forum.

Please check this forum recent thread and let me know if this helps?

Thank you for the forum link (it doesn’t really seem like there’s a solution there). Google is a little weird with these average scores and how they round them I think. Please take a look at our businesses’ example and let me know if you come to the same conclusion:

Since we only have 55 reviews, I have been able easily track how these are rounded. Quite frankly, it doesn’t make much sense to me because our average score comes out to 4.745454545454545 (51x 5-star review + 1x 3-star review + 3x 1-star reviews = 261/55 = 4.745454545454545). This number should technically be rounded down to 4.7, but I think Google is trying to help businesses and have come up with a different way of rounding up — please continue reading below.

The rounding up occurred (I believe) after we got our last 5-star review. To put this in perspective, when we had 54 reviews, our average score was 4.740740740740741 (256/54). What I take from this is that they must round up from thousandths place. So our last unrounded average score with 54 review was 4.740740740740741 (rounded to 4.74, then to 4.7) and our new 55-review average score was 4.745454545454545 (rounded to 4.75, then to 4.8). That’s the only conclusion I can draw here that makes sense to me. It’s a little weird way to round but it makes sense from a perspective that they are trying to marginally help businesses somewhat.

I’m not sure if there is a way for you to build in rounding like this (or make it an option), but it could potentially resolve this issue for some people that fits this narrow case.

@mreed3689 Thank you for this fantastic reply!

This breakdown offers a really helpful insight into how Google calculates its overall rating and will offer a clearer view to others with a similar discrepancy between the Places API and the search results.

You can see that, like many review websites, Google My Business may not use an actual average. This shows that it is possible to have the overall rating skewed upward by a small amount. There are other rating services such as Trustpilot that heavily skew away from the outer ratings (1 and 5) towards a middling number.

In a future release, I will look to implement workaround for the 0.1 difference – such as a temporary adjustment that considers a specific overall review count and will only round up for a limited time while this is a match. Or something similar…

I’ll mark this as “resolved” for now because it’s caused by external factors and not the plugin itself.

Thanks again for this reply!

That would be fantastic. I look forward to the future “rounding” update that helps resolve this discrepancy. Thank you for your willingness to make a potential update here.

I forgot to include this in my less post: My guess is that you could round twice to accomplish this. So you could first round the unrounded average rating to the hundredths place (in my example above, 4.745454545454545 would be rounded to 4.75). Then round a second time to the tenth place (4.75 would then be rounded to 4.8). Hope this helps!

@mreed3689 Thanks for the tip. This would only work with a complete set of reviews for a given place.

I think it still needs a lot of thought to make something that won’t override genuine overall ratings but would also be usable when such a situation arises.

Just a strange development here: Our average rating on Google is now down to 4.7 and NOTHING has changed (we still have the same 55 reviews). Maybe Google made some correction on their end in the last day or two. I wonder if this is happening with other users of your plugin that were experiencing the same issue.

@mreed3689 That is interesting.

I will keep this in mind the next time someone reports the same issue – it could be that the Places API is correct and the Google My Business/maps/search results one is not…