Healthcare review snippets have dropped, Schema App reports

Schema App published a post on 5 October 2026 saying review snippets have fallen for its healthcare customers. Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz reported it on 7 October and wrote that Google seems to no longer show review rich results for healthcare pages. This is a structured data observation about a SERP feature, not a Google announcement.

What did Schema App see?#

Andrea Badder wrote that Schema App has seen Review Snippet visibility fall across its healthcare customers since late May, with a second drop in early August for some organizations. According to Schwartz, she shared a sample chart from Search Console’s performance report filtered by search appearance. We have not seen the underlying data, so the figures are as Schema App and Schwartz present them.

Schema App’s Customer Success team checked whether its own markup caused the decline. It tested different ways of connecting aggregateRating, alternative property paths and multi-typing healthcare entities with Product. None of that restored Review Snippet performance, the post says.

Has Google confirmed a change?#

No. We read Google’s review snippet documentation and its documentation updates log on 8 October 2026. Neither mentions healthcare, medical pages or any type-based exclusion. The review snippet page shows a last updated date of 8 September 2026, and the log’s latest review snippet entry is the 24 July guideline on fake and undisclosed incentivized reviews.

Schwartz notes Google has a history of turning off rich results, including for specific industries. He wondered whether Google turned them off for the medical space, and said he does not personally see them in searches for doctors and dentists outside the local results. That is his observation and his question, not a finding.

Did the markup stop working?#

Schema App does not say so. It writes that the pages it analyzed remain eligible for Review Snippets and that it has not attributed the decline to a corresponding drop in overall organic traffic. Many customers, it adds, had not noticed the change until its team raised it.

It compares the situation to Google’s 2023 reduction of FAQ rich result visibility, which it says changed the value of a SERP feature without making the markup less useful for machines. That comparison is Schema App’s own framing.

What did customers decide?#

Per the post, some customers were open to further testing, but many were not interested in changing semantically accurate markup just to try to recover the rich result. Their priority was markup that accurately represents physicians, locations, services, specialties and relationships for search engines and AI systems. Schema App says that, for healthcare, defining the organization accurately for machines matters most.

What should you check?#

Pull your own data before concluding anything: in Search Console’s performance report, filter by search appearance and compare review snippet impressions across late May and early August. Confirm your markup still validates in our AggregateRating schema checker, and that the review content is visible on the page. Google’s documentation also keeps an older rule that pages using LocalBusiness or other Organization markup are ineligible for star review features when the reviewed entity controls the reviews about itself. Neither source ties that rule to this drop, so treat it as a separate check, not an explanation.