Should a contractor website show reviews? Yes — 27 of 39 Grand Rapids winners do, nine of them through a live widget

The honest version of this question is not whether reviews matter — 40 of 40 top-ranked Grand Rapids trades have a website and the twelve top map spots we read on 15 September held 22 to 12,142 reviews — but whether the reviews belong on the website too, and in what form. That is a question about what the site is for. The reviews already exist on Google; the site’s job is to let a visitor see them without leaving, and to do it in a way that does not break Google’s rules or the FTC’s. This page counts how the sites that already win do it, then reads the two rules.

The measurement: 39 home pages, five ways to show a review

On 16 September 2026 I fetched the home page of each of the 40 businesses in our 15 September sweep — the top ten map-pack results for plumber, roofer, HVAC and electrician in Grand Rapids — with curl, the same way a crawler does, and read the HTML for five signals: a third-party review widget script or class (Trustindex, Elfsight, NiceJob, Podium, Rize and the like), a printed star figure next to the word stars, rating or reviews, a printed review count, testimonial copy (a testimonials heading or a “what our customers say” section), and an AggregateRating or Review object in the page’s JSON-LD. I also recorded whether the page links out to its Google reviews. One electrical site did not answer, so the count is 39. The raw file is in the receipts.

How the home page shows reviews (read 16 Sep 2026)	Sites	Of 39
Live widget pulling in Google or other reviews	9	23%
Star rating printed on the page (4.5 to 5.0)	10	26%
Review count printed on the page (37 to 1,283)	9	23%
Testimonial text on the page	21	54%
AggregateRating or Review in schema markup	8	21%
Any of the five above	27	69%
Link out to Google reviews	21	54%
Link only, nothing shown on the page	6	15%
Shown on the page or linked	33	85%
Nothing at all	6	15%

Trade (top ten map results, Grand Rapids)	Sites read	Reviews shown on the page	Link to Google reviews	Shown or linked
Plumbers	10	9	7	10
Roofers	10	7	3	7
HVAC	10	6	8	9
Electricians	9	5	3	7
All	39	27	21	33

Three things in those tables. First, the plumbers are unanimous — every one of the ten shows or links reviews — and the HVAC companies nearly so; the six sites with nothing at all are three roofers (Trident Roof Solutions, Allied Roofing, Veenkamp Roofing and Siding), one HVAC company (Chris Climate) and two electricians (Bazen Electric, Eco Electric). Two of the three roofers show no phone number or contact text in the HTML a crawler receives either, which usually means the page is drawn by JavaScript after it loads, so this method may under-count them. Second, the counts the sites choose to print are big: Pro-Tech Heating & Cooling 1,283, Benjamin Franklin Plumbing 968, Mr. Rooter 788, Roto-Rooter 477, R&R Heating and Cooling 436, Above Roofing “400+”, Weatherhead & Sons 119, Webb Electric “90+”, Swanson Electrical 37 — a business prints the number when the number helps. Third, the nine widgets are five different products, and five of the nine are Trustindex; nobody in the top forty needed a bespoke review page to rank.

The reviews already exist on Google. The site’s job is to let a visitor see them without leaving.

What Google says about stars on your own site

Eight of the 39 home pages carry an AggregateRating or Review object in their structured data — Ferrer Plumbing, Roto-Rooter, Above Roofing, Mr. Roof, R&R Heating and Cooling, Pro-Tech, Vredevoogd and Amp Electric — presumably in the hope of star ratings under their listing in Google’s results. Google’s review-snippet documentation, read 16 September 2026, is direct about it: “If the entity that’s being reviewed controls the reviews about itself, their pages that use LocalBusiness or any other type of Organization structured data are ineligible for star review feature. For example, a review about entity A is placed on the website of entity A, either directly in their structured data or through an embedded third-party widget (for example, Google Business reviews or Facebook reviews widget).” The same page adds: “Ratings must be sourced directly from users. Don’t rely on human editors to create, curate, or compile ratings information for local businesses.”

So the markup on those eight pages is not doing what its owners think. It does no harm I can measure — 16 of 39 top-ranked sites rank without any business type in their schema — but it is not why anyone on this list is in the map pack. The stars a local business earns show on its Business Profile, in Maps and in the local results, and they come from the profile’s reviews, not from a snippet on the home page.

What the FTC rule says about testimonials on your site

Twenty-one of the 39 pages carry testimonial text — a quotes section, a “what our customers say” block, a page of praise. That is the oldest way to do it and it is still legal, with conditions the FTC wrote down. Its trade regulation rule on the use of consumer reviews and testimonials, announced 14 August 2024 and read on the FTC’s own site on 16 September 2026, prohibits “reviews and testimonials that misrepresent that they are by someone who does not exist, such as AI-generated fake reviews, or who did not have actual experience with the business”; prohibits “providing compensation or other incentives conditioned on the writing of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment”; prohibits testimonials by “officers or managers” that do not disclose the connection; and — the line that matters for a website — “bars a business from misrepresenting that the reviews on a review portion of its website represent all or most of the reviews submitted when reviews have been suppressed based upon their ratings or negative sentiment.” The rule lets the agency seek civil penalties; the vote was 5–0.

Google’s Business Profile help says the same thing about incentives from its side, read 16 September 2026: “Offering incentives, like free or discounted goods or services, in exchange for customers to post reviews, change reviews, or remove negative reviews is considered fake & misleading content and is strictly prohibited.” Its advice for getting more of them is plain: “To leave reviews, you can ask customers to visit a Google link or scan a QR code.”

Read together: a hand-picked quotes section is fine if the people are real, said it, and the section does not claim to be “our reviews” while the two-star ones were left out. A live widget that shows what Google shows sidesteps the question entirely, which is one reason nine of the top forty use one. None of this is legal advice; it is what the two documents say, with the dates I read them.

Verdict: how to show reviews on a contractor website

Approach	What the 39 top-ranked sites do	Verdict
A live widget pulling your Google reviews onto the page	9 of 39	Yes. It shows what Google shows, updates itself, and cannot be accused of filtering. Do not expect stars in search results from it.
A printed rating and count, linked to the Google listing	10 print a rating, 9 a count, 21 link out	Yes — the cheapest honest version. Put the date you last updated the number next to it.
Testimonial quotes typed into the page	21 of 39	Fine with a real name, a real job and permission. Never label a curated selection as your reviews.
AggregateRating or Review schema on your own site	8 of 39	No. Google says those pages are ineligible for the star feature; the markup is effort without a result.
Nothing on the site	6 of 39	No. 33 of your top-ranked competitors show or link something; a visitor comparing tabs sees the gap.
Buying, incentivising or writing reviews	—	No. Prohibited by Google’s policy and the FTC’s rule, with civil penalties.

What this reading does not prove

• Home pages only. A site with a separate reviews page and nothing on the home page counts as nothing here.
• It is a read of HTML, not of screens. Pages drawn by JavaScript after load — at least two of the six “nothing” sites look that way — can show reviews this method cannot see.
• Correlation, not cause. These 39 sites rank because of their profiles, distance and prominence; showing reviews on the site is what winners do, not what made them win.
• The star figures are as printed. I read 4.7, 4.8, 4.9 off the pages; I did not check them against each profile.
• The law is summarised from the FTC’s press release, not the rule text, and I am not a lawyer.

How we do it

This site shows no testimonials, because it has none to show honestly: the three example builds linked from the home page are demonstrations, each page says so, and the businesses on them are fictional, so there is nobody to quote. When there is a real customer with something to say, it will appear with their name and their permission and not before.

For the sites we build, reviews are on the card. The Business Site ($2,499 starting, 5–8 pages) lists local schema, reviews and analytics; the contractor version is the same build for a trade. On the profile side, the Profile Tune-Up ($750 one-time) includes review strategy setup, and Managed Local includes review requests and responses month to month, per location. What a profile needs to rank in the first place is on the reviews-to-rank page; what else the top-ranked sites have in common — a lead form, an FAQ, a page per service — is measured on its own pages.

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