Google Reviews Scraper

Extract Google Maps reviews through the official Google Places API. Find places by search query or place ID, and get each review's author, star rating, text, and date as structured data.

Read this first — the 5-review limit. This Actor uses the official Google Places API, which returns at most 5 reviews per place. That is a hard limit imposed by Google, not by this Actor. If you need thousands of reviews for a single business, this Actor cannot provide them.

It is built for breadth, not depth: run it across many places (hundreds of competitors, branches, or search results) and get the 5 most relevant reviews for each.

What you need

You bring your own Google Maps Platform API key (googleApiKey). Google grants $200 of free credit each month, which covers a large volume of Place Details requests at no cost to you. Get a key at console.cloud.google.com and enable the Places API (New).

Features

• ✅ Find places by search query (e.g. Starbucks New York) or by Google place ID
• ✅ Up to 5 reviews per place — author name, star rating, review text, dates
• ✅ Place context on every row: name, address, overall rating, total review count
• ✅ Filter results to a specific star rating
• ✅ Multi-language support
• ✅ Official API — no bot detection, no proxies, no breakage from layout changes

Use Cases

• Competitor sweeps: pull reviews across many competing businesses at once
• Multi-location monitoring: track sentiment across every branch you operate
• Sentiment analysis: feed recent review text into an AI pipeline
• Market research: sample what customers say across a whole category

Input

{
  "googleApiKey": "YOUR_GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY",
  "searchQueries": [
    "Starbucks Times Square New York",
    "best sushi restaurant Tokyo"
  ],
  "placeIds": [
    "ChIJN1t_tDeuEmsRUsoyG83frY4"
  ],
  "filterRating": 5,
  "language": "en"
}

Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Required	Description
googleApiKey	string	Yes	Your Google Maps Platform API key (stored encrypted)
searchQueries	array	No*	Business name + location, e.g. "Starbucks New York"
placeIds	array	No*	Google Maps place IDs, e.g. ChIJN1t_tDeuEmsRUsoyG83frY4
filterRating	integer	No	Keep only reviews with this exact star rating (1–5)
language	string	No	Language code for results (e.g. en, ja, es)

*Provide searchQueries, placeIds, or both.

Without a googleApiKey the Actor exits successfully with zero results instead of failing.

Output

One dataset row per review:

{
  "placeName": "Starbucks",
  "placeUrl": "https://maps.google.com/?cid=...",
  "placeAddress": "123 Main St, New York, NY",
  "placeRating": 4.2,
  "placeTotalReviews": 1523,
  "reviewAuthor": "John Smith",
  "reviewAuthorUrl": "https://www.google.com/maps/contrib/...",
  "reviewRating": 5,
  "reviewText": "Great coffee and friendly staff!",
  "reviewDate": "2024-11-15T10:30:00Z",
  "reviewRelativeDate": "2 months ago",
  "scrapedAt": "2024-01-15T10:30:00.000Z"
}

placeTotalReviews is the place's true total on Google (e.g. 1,523) — but only up to 5 of those reviews are returned, per Google's API limit.

Pricing

• $0.02 per review returned (each dataset row)
• $0.00005 per Actor start

Because each place yields at most 5 reviews, one place costs at most $0.10. Example: 100 places ≈ 500 reviews ≈ $10.00.

The Google Places API calls themselves are billed by Google to your own API key, and typically fall inside Google's $200/month free credit.

Tips

1. Start small: run one search query first and inspect the output.
2. Use place IDs for precision: a search query returns Google's best match, which may not be the exact branch you meant.
3. filterRating reduces cost: filtered-out reviews are never pushed to the dataset, so you are not charged for them.
4. Language: set language: "ja" for Japanese, "es" for Spanish, and so on.

Limitations

• Maximum 5 reviews per place — a hard Google Places API limit.
• No sort control. Google decides which reviews it considers most relevant and returns those.
• Owner responses, review photos, and review "likes" are not available through this API and are not returned.
• Deleted reviews are not captured.

Support

For issues or questions, contact support or open an issue on GitHub.

License

MIT License - Use commercially without restrictions.