Google Maps Negative Review Alert

Google Maps review monitor that watches your business listings on a schedule and alerts you on two things that actually cost money: a rating drop and a new negative review — with the review text, star count, and direct link, so you can respond the same day instead of discovering it weeks later.

Features

• Alerts, not dumps: review scrapers give you every review, every time. This monitor reports only what changed — new reviews at or below your star threshold, and average-rating drops beyond your delta.
• Multi-location: watch up to 50 listings per run — every branch of a franchise, every client of an agency.
• Full alert record: place name, current vs previous rating, review text, stars, publication date, direct review URL.
• Schedule-ready: state persists between runs; a review only ever alerts once.
• Safe on flaky crawls: a listing that temporarily fails to fetch keeps its baseline — no false re-alerts.
• No personal reviewer data is collected.

Use cases

• Franchises & multi-site businesses: know within hours when any location takes a 1-star hit.
• Reputation & marketing agencies: monitor every client's listing from one scheduled task and prove your responsiveness.
• Dentists, clinics, restaurants, hotels: negative reviews left unanswered are the #1 local-conversion killer.
• Ops teams: a sudden rating drop at one branch is an early-warning signal of an operational problem.

Input / Output

Input:

{
  "places": [
    "https://www.google.com/maps/place/Your+Restaurant/@45.76,4.83,17z",
    "ChIJreV9aqYWdkgROM_boL6YbwA"
  ],
  "badReviewStars": 2,
  "ratingDropThreshold": "0.1"
}

Output — one dataset item per alert:

{
  "type": "negative_review",
  "placeId": "ChIJ...",
  "name": "Chez Antoine",
  "currentScore": 4.2,
  "reviewStars": 1,
  "reviewText": "Attente d'une heure, c'est inacceptable",
  "reviewPublishedAt": "2026-07-05T19:00:00.000Z",
  "reviewUrl": "https://www.google.com/maps/reviews/...",
  "detectedAt": "2026-07-06T09:00:00.000Z"
}

Alert types: negative_review, rating_drop (with previousScore and scoreDelta), and baseline (first run only, one per listing). A SUMMARY record in the key-value store reports per-run counts.

Pricing

Pay per event: a small fee per alert item. Under the hood the Actor runs the standard Google Maps Scraper (compass/crawler-google-places, billed to your account at its own pay-per-event rate: ~$0.004 per place plus ~$0.0005 per review checked). Watching 10 listings × 20 newest reviews daily costs roughly $0.14/day in scanning.

FAQ

How do alerts avoid duplicates? Seen review IDs and the last known rating are stored per listing in a persistent key-value store; only unseen negative reviews and fresh rating drops are reported.

What does the first run return? One baseline item per listing (current rating, review count). Alerts start from the second run.

How many of the reviews are checked? The newest maxReviewsPerPlace (default 20) per run. Schedule daily or weekly so new reviews always fall inside that window.

Place URL or Place ID? Both work, but Place IDs (ChIJ...) are the most reliable — some decorated Google Maps URLs resolve to zero results in the underlying scraper. Grab the ID from Google's Place ID finder or from any Google Maps scraper output.

How do I reset the baseline? Change monitorId (or the set of places — each set keeps its own state).

Is this legal? The Actor collects public listing data and public review content via the standard Apify Google Maps Scraper, with reviewer personal data collection disabled. You are responsible for how you use the data.