I shipped a fake AggregateRating to my own site. Then I caught myself.

Six days into launching Vantage I had zero users. I added an AggregateRating schema with fake numbers anyway.

It was day 6 after launch. The site had three signups, none of them paying. I was looking at how Jobscan and Resume Worded ranked, copying patterns, and I added an AggregateRating schema to my Organization markup.

The numbers I made up were small. "ratingValue": 4.7 . "reviewCount": 23 . Nothing flashy. Just enough to feel real.

I committed it. Pushed it. Then I went to make coffee, came back, and reread the diff before opening the next task.

And it hit me, very simply: I had just lied in JSON-LD on a page where the second visible bullet on my pricing page is "no fabrication." A user shopping me against Jobscan would not see those numbers — Google would. But Google was not the audience I had spent six months building for. The audience was the one person about to spend £5 trusting me.

I removed it the same hour.…