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"The only benefit is trust , increase CTR etc and obviously reviews markup." This is a huge benefit though.  It's abut users at the end of the day and having those stars showing in the serps and having the reviews scrolling on your site (using a widget) has helped me enormously with CTR.  It's one of those where you need to think less about the technical SEO stuff and more about how having the reviews there will increase the CTR and conversion rates.  It also helps time on site - all MASSIVE ranking signals. If I said to you that a piece of technical wizzardry could increase CTR, TOS and conversions then you'd learn how to do it and implement it like immediately.  Well that's what reviews do.  So i'd not worry about marking them up or just use a wordpress widget and get them on there. I'm not massively technical but we do have 500 5* reviews with a widget on every page of the site and are in the top 3 for most non-branded searches because of our CTR. Also google says they want to eventually live in a world without markup when the algo gets smarter so it's all going to be a moot point. Sorry If i've missed the technical nuances of this but we're doing super well just having the nice comments up there on the site (which is more than lots of your competitors have)