Google Reviews Monitor

Google reviews monitor for every location you look after, only what changed: new reviews, edited ones, fresh owner replies and a falling star rating, checked on a schedule and flagged when a low-star review sits unanswered. It can also draft a public reply for the urgent ones, on your own AI key.

The dataset holds one row per location, with the counts, the rating change, the themes and the urgent reviews in full. Turn on reviewRows for one more row per new or changed review. Every review it has seen goes to a named store and a named dataset on your own account.

Input	Your Google Business locations: a Maps link, a place ID or CID, or a search like dentists in Austin TX
Output	One row per location per run, with the urgent reviews nested inside it, and one per new review if you ask
Ceiling	Up to 1,000 of the newest reviews per location per run
Account needed	None to monitor. Your own Anthropic or OpenAI key only for the AI text
Price	$1.00 per 1,000 new or changed reviews, plus $0.015 per location checked, $0.01 per AI summary or reply draft and $0.05 per HTML report on the Free plan, a little less on paid plans. The free plan's $5 a month covers about 5,000 reviews, or about 330 location checks

🔍 What Google Reviews Monitor does

Each branch is its own Google Business profile, and a bad week at one of them is easy to miss when you have twenty. So this checks them all and tells you what moved.

Changes, not re-dumps. The first run for a location learns what is there. Every run after that reports only what appeared or changed: a new review, an edited one, a review going from unanswered to answered, a fall in the overall rating. State lives in a named key-value store, reviews-monitor-state, on your account, and the change records go to a named dataset, reviews-monitor-history.

Alerts. Put a Slack or Discord incoming webhook in webhookUrl and you get a short summary when something moved. Anything else gets plain JSON, which is what Zapier, Make and n8n want.

The AI part is optional and runs on your key. Summaries and reply drafts come from new or changed reviews only, never from history. Without a key you still get a plain summary, free.

📋 What data you get from each Google Business location

What you get	Field
Your label, Google's name for the place, and the link you gave	clientName, placeName, url
Google's ids for the place	featureId, cid, placeId
Address, category, map position, website and phone, as the listing shows them	address, street, city, postalCode, state, countryCode, categories, latitude, longitude, website, phone
Whether Google marks the place permanently closed	permanentlyClosed
When this check ran	checkedAt
Whether the location could be read, and why not	syncStatus, error
Whether this was the baseline run	isFirstRun
The headline numbers this run	overallRating, totalReviewCount
New, changed, negative, unanswered, newly answered and urgent, as counts	counts
The rating before and after, and whether it fell	ratingChange
The words coming up most in new negative reviews	themes
The negative, unanswered reviews in full, with a draft reply when drafts are on	urgentReviews
New reviews that mention your watched words, or carry the star ratings you picked	keywordMatches, ratingAlerts
Owner replies that appeared since the last run, with what they say	newOwnerReplies
A short briefing for the location	agencySummary
Whether anything happened worth telling someone about	hasSignal
A link to the rolled-up HTML report	reportUrl

Each review, wherever it appears:

What you get	Field
The exact time it was posted, or last edited, and Google's relative wording	publishedAt, relativeDate
A link that opens the review on Google Maps	reviewUrl
Stars, the writer's own words and their language, and Google's translation when there is one	rating, text, language, textTranslated, translatedFrom
The owner's reply and when it was posted	ownerReplyText, ownerReplyRelativeDate
Food, service and atmosphere scores, or rooms, service and location, and the trip details, on restaurants and hotels	subRatings, visitDetails
Where the review came from	source
The reviewer's name, unless you switch names off	reviewerName
Optional: photo links, the reviewer's profile link and id, their review and photo counts, Local Guide or not	photos, reviewerUrl, reviewerId, reviewerReviewCount, reviewerPhotoCount, reviewerIsLocalGuide

▶️ How to scrape Google reviews for several locations

1. Open Google Reviews Monitor and click Try for free.
2. Add each branch to Client locations to monitor with your own label and its Maps link or place ID, or type a search into Search for places. Replace the example.
3. Leave Max reviews to load per location at 10, or raise it once for a backfill.
4. Paste a Slack or Discord webhook into Webhook URL if you want alerts, then click Start.
5. Once the first run looks right, put it on a schedule from the Schedules tab.

💰 How much does it cost to scrape and monitor Google reviews?

What	Price
A new or changed review processed	$0.001
A location checked	$0.015
An AI summary or reply draft generated	$0.01
The rolled-up HTML report	$0.05 per run

These are Free plan prices. Paid plans pay a little less on every line. On the free plan, the $5 Apify gives you each month covers about 5,000 processed reviews, or about 330 location checks.

The report charge fires on every run while weeklyReport is on, including a quiet run and a run where no location could be read. Switch it off if you do not read the HTML report, especially on a frequent schedule.

A location that could not be read is not charged as a check. The first run processes every review it loads, so keep maxReviewsPerRun small then unless you want the backfill. The AI text runs on your own Anthropic or OpenAI key, and that provider bills you for the tokens.

📥 What you give it

{
  "locations": [
    {
      "clientName": "Acme Coffee, Downtown",
      "googleMapsUrl": "https://www.google.com/maps/place/Acme+Coffee/@40.7185,-73.9571,17z/data=!4m7..."
    }
  ],
  "maxReviewsPerRun": 10,
  "negativeRatingThreshold": 3,
  "webhookUrl": ""
}

Field	Default	What it is
locations	none	One entry per location: clientName is your own label, googleMapsUrl is the Maps link, a review or search link, a place ID (ChIJ...), a CID or a feature ID.
maxReviewsPerRun	10	Newest reviews to load per location each run. 10 suits a scheduled monitor.
searchQueries	none	Searches like dentists in Austin TX. The first run saves the places found and later runs check the same ones. Each is billed as a location.
maxPlacesPerSearch	5	Places taken from each search, 1 to 20.
onlyReviewsNewerThan	none	A date like 2026-10-01 or an age like 7 days. Older reviews are not read, so a first run bills fewer.
watchKeywords	none	Words like refund or parking. A new review or reply that contains one is listed in keywordMatches and raises the alert.
alertOnRatings	none	Star ratings that raise the alert, say 5 for praise. When set, it replaces the threshold for alerts.
onlyNewSinceLastRun	on	Currently has no effect. Every run after the first reports only what is new or changed, on or off.
alertOnNewReviews	on	Count a location as worth alerting on when it has any new review.
alertOnNegativeReviews	on	Flag new reviews at or below the threshold.
negativeRatingThreshold	3	Stars at or below this count as negative.
detectRatingDrops	on	Compare the overall rating against last run and flag a fall.
trackOwnerReplies	on	Currently has no effect. Reply detection happens anyway.
generateAiSummary	on	A short briefing per location, from the new reviews only. Plain and free without a key.
generateReplyDrafts	off	Draft a public reply for each urgent review. Capped per run.
aiModel	gpt-4o-mini	GPT models need an OpenAI key, Claude models an Anthropic key.
anthropicApiKey	none	Your own Anthropic key. Stored as a secret.
openaiApiKey	none	Your own OpenAI key. Stored as a secret.
weeklyReport	on	Render one rolled-up HTML report and link it from every row. Read the cost note.
webhookUrl	empty	Slack, Discord or any endpoint that takes JSON.
includeReviewerNames	on	Off leaves names out of the rows and out of the stored history.
includeReviewPhotos	off	Add photo links. Nothing is downloaded.
includeReviewerDetails	off	Add the reviewer's public profile link, id, review and photo counts and Local Guide flag. Off, none of it is stored.
googleReviewsOnly	off	Leave out any review another site supplied to Google.
reviewRows	off	One more row per new or changed review, with the place's columns. No extra charge.
proxyConfiguration	leave it alone	Optional. Your own servers are used exactly as given.

Paste the place ID itself (ChIJ...), or the long /maps/place/... link. A ?q=place_id: link, like the form's example, does not identify the branch: two locations written that way are tracked as one place, with wrong counts on both.

📤 What you get back

A real row from a scheduled run on 26 September 2026, with the review texts and the report link cut short and one of the three urgent reviews left out:

{
  "clientName": "Example. Googleplex",
  "placeName": "Googleplex",
  "url": "https://www.google.com/maps/place/?q=place_id:ChIJj61dQgK6j4AR4GeTYWZsKWw",
  "isFirstRun": false,
  "overallRating": 4.1,
  "totalReviewCount": 9653,
  "counts": { "new": 4, "changed": 0, "negative": 3, "unanswered": 4, "newOwnerReplies": 0, "urgent": 3 },
  "ratingChange": { "before": 4.1, "after": 4.1, "delta": 0, "dropped": false },
  "themes": ["google", "course", "one", "complete"],
  "urgentReviews": [
    {
      "reviewId": "Ci9DQUlRQUNvZENodHljRjlvT213eldUQkROREZHZWpoNFdUTnRVV3RHYVhWUmRVRRAB",
      "rating": 1,
      "reviewerName": "Reviewer",
      "relativeDate": "a month ago",
      "text": "ONE OF MY ON GOING EMAIL BATTLES WITH GOOGLE WHILE TRYING TO COMPLETE ONE OF THEIR AI CERTIFICATIONS...",
      "reason": "negative & unanswered"
    },
    {
      "reviewId": "Ci9DQUlRQUNvZENodHljRjlvT25RNFUxQTNSRkp0TjI5RU9WWTVhVkZ0TVdsTlVuYxAB",
      "rating": 1,
      "reviewerName": "Reviewer",
      "relativeDate": "a month ago",
      "text": "Example review text.",
      "reason": "negative & unanswered"
    }
  ],
  "agencySummary": "4 new reviews (avg 2.5*). 3 urgent need replies. themes: google, course, one, complete.",
  "aiGenerations": 0,
  "hasSignal": true,
  "target": "gmaps:url:www.google.com/maps/place/",
  "syncStatus": "ok",
  "reportUrl": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/qpMTl0FkluYVVBYZs/records/latest-report.html?signature=..."
}

Field	How to read it
counts.urgent	Negative and unanswered. These are the ones in urgentReviews.
ratingChange.dropped	true when the overall rating fell since the last run.
agencySummary	The plain summary here, since this run had no AI key. With a key it reads like a short briefing.
target	The key the location's history is stored under. A ?q=place_id: link always gives this same key, which is why the warning above matters.
relativeDate	Google's own wording. publishedAt has the exact time, and for an edited review it is the time of the edit.

🧾 Reading the output

Row	How to spot it	Charged as a location check
A location that was read	syncStatus: "ok"	yes
A location that could not be read	syncStatus: "failed" with an error	no
A place with no reviews on Google yet, or a search that found no place with reviews	recordType: "note", errorCode: "NO_RESULTS", with the reason in error and what happens next in details	no

Filter your alerting on hasSignal. A quiet run writes a row per location with hasSignal: false and empty counts, which is normal and not a fault.

The first run for a location is a baseline: it reports isFirstRun: true and sends no webhook. A failed location keeps its saved state, so the next run picks the same changes up.

💡 What people use it for

• An agency watching every client's branches and getting one Slack message a morning.
• A franchise spotting the one site whose rating slipped this week.
• A support team pulling urgentReviews straight into a queue, with a draft reply attached.
• Keeping a record of what changed, by reading the named history dataset rather than the run.

From a brand name to a morning alert, in three steps:

1. Run Google Maps Scraper on a search like Acme Coffee in Chicago, IL and copy the name and placeUrl of each branch.
2. Add each one to locations here, the name as clientName and the link as googleMapsUrl.
3. Paste a Slack webhook into webhookUrl and schedule the run for every morning.

🚧 What it does not do

• Some locations will not load on a given run, and then you get a failed row instead of counts. It is not charged as a check, and the next run tries again.
• At most 1,000 reviews per location per run, the newest first. Older history past that is not read.
• No star breakdown, only the average and the count.
• Deleted reviews are never reported. It sees what is there, not what left.
• onlyNewSinceLastRun and trackOwnerReplies do nothing. Changes and replies are reported either way.
• The saved state never prunes, so the named store grows the longer you run it.
• A ?q=place_id: link cannot tell two locations apart. Use the full address-bar link.
• It is not an official Google tool. Dami's Studio is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google, or by any other company named on this page.

🧭 Which Google Maps scraper do you need?

If you want	Use
Places from a search, with reviews optional	Google Maps Scraper
Reviews for a place you can link or name, with exact dates	Google Maps Reviews Scraper
The photos and videos on a place	Google Maps Place Photos Scraper
Only what changed in your own locations' reviews, on a schedule	This one
Businesses in Russia and the CIS, from Yandex Maps	Yandex Maps Scraper

❓ Questions people ask

How do I get only new Google reviews instead of the whole history?

Every run does that. The first run is the baseline; after that you get changes only.

Can it post to Slack?

Yes. Put a Slack incoming webhook in webhookUrl and the payload is formatted for it. Discord works the same way, and anything else gets plain JSON. Nothing is sent on a quiet run or on the first one.

Do I need an AI key?

Only for AI-written summaries and reply drafts. Everything else works without one.

Where are the individual reviews?

In urgentReviews on the row, one row each with reviewRows on, and in the named reviews-monitor-history dataset on your account.

Can I call it from code or connect it to an AI assistant?

The API tab has code for Python, JavaScript and the CLI. MCP clients like Claude and ChatGPT use https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,dami_studio/google-reviews-monitor; coding assistants can load our skill file. All three bill your Apify account at the same price.

Is monitoring Google reviews legal?

These are public reviews, and they carry personal data that GDPR and similar laws cover, so have a reason for keeping it. Apify's write-up on the legality of web scraping is a good starting point, and we are not lawyers.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Send the run ID and the Maps link of the location that misbehaved. The error text on a failed row usually names the problem on its own.