Model checking is a popular formal technique facilitating automatic verification of finite-state transition systems, and it has been applied to almost all of the Web service verification aspects, such as control-flow, data-flow, interaction, time requirements, quality of service, security requirements, etc. However, no systematic literature review focused on model checking of Web services is available. Motivated by this fact, in this paper, we systematically review existing research works on model checking based Web service verification appeared during the period of 2002-2017. We present a verification goal based classification of the collected articles, and for each paper, we identify the verification technique, target Web service standard, flavor of the employed model checking technique and tool, and other supplementary techniques, if any. Further, we highlight some of the issues, gaps, key challenges in this area and propose some future directions.