u/Commercial-Pause-612

Took me longer than it should have to figure this out, so sharing in case it saves someone else the headache.

To get stars showing on your Shopping ads, you need three things to line up:

1. A licensed review aggregator. Google has an approved list, Trustpilot, Bazaarvoice, Reviews.io (good for Shopify native integration and automated review collection), and a handful of others. Your review platform has to be on that list, or it doesn't count, regardless of how many reviews you have.
2. 100 or more reviews in the last 12 months linked to your domain. This is the one most people miss. It's not your total review count, it's reviews collected in the past year that are tied to your actual domain. If you migrated platforms or switched tools at any point, your count can reset.
3. The aggregator has to be actively syncing with Google. Having the platform isn't enough, the integration has to be live and passing data correctly.

Once all three are in place, it typically takes 6 to 8 weeks before stars start showing. It's not instant.

For Shopify merchants, the setup is around 2 hours if you're using one of the native integrations. The part that catches people out is the domain verification step, which is easy to skip over.

Curious if anyone else ran into issues getting this set up or found ways to hit the 100 review threshold faster.