The April 2023 reviews update ran from 12 to 25 April 2023, taking 13 days. This is where Google dropped the word product from the name. The system stopped being about physical goods and started covering reviews of services, businesses, destinations, media and anything else that can be reviewed. Sites that had never sold a product found themselves inside its scope overnight.
The rename was the update
Google announced that the system now evaluated reviews of things beyond products: services, businesses, places, media, games and more. Nothing about the standard changed, only what it applied to.
That caught a category of site that had watched three years of product reviews updates without concern. Travel blogs reviewing hotels, sites reviewing software or courses, restaurant and venue reviewers, and film or game criticism all became subject to the same evidence requirement.
What first-hand experience means for a service review
- Software and SaaS reviews: screenshots from your own account, actual configuration steps, a stated trial period and what broke.
- Hotel and destination reviews: your photographs, dated visits, what the listing photos do not show.
- Course and training reviews: enrolment evidence, what the syllabus actually delivered, who it suits and who it does not.
- Restaurant and venue reviews: what you ordered, when, and what it cost.
The test is the same as it was in 2021: could a reader tell you had been there or used it, or could this have been assembled from the provider’s own marketing?
If your service review site dropped in April 2023
Check first whether the loss was limited to review-style pages. A travel site where destination guides held and hotel reviews fell is a clean match for this update. A site where everything fell is looking at something else, since a core update did not run in this window.
Recovery does not wait for a scheduled release. The system went continuous from December 2023, so genuine improvement gets reassessed within weeks. The page scope analyzer will confirm whether the loss really was confined to review pages.
Service or travel site that dropped in April 2023?
That is when the reviews system stopped being about products, and most affected owners never realised it applied to them. Send your Search Console access and I will confirm it.
Get free recovery auditHow the reviews system works today, now that it updates continuously without announcements, is covered in Google’s reviews system in 2026.
Source: Google ranking updates list
Traffic dropped around Apr 12, 2023?
Get a free preliminary diagnosis. I confirm whether this reviews update is the cause before you spend on fixes.