Google Maps Reviews Scraper

Get real reviews — author, star rating, full text, and timestamp — from any Google Maps place. This actor drives a real browser because Google's modern review endpoint requires a BotGuard anti-abuse token that only a real browser session can produce; static HTTP replay does not work for this data (verified during development).

How it works

1. Resolves the place's display name from its Google place ID.
2. Searches for it on Google Maps and opens the place's full detail panel.
3. Opens the Reviews tab and extracts the first batch of reviews directly from the page.
4. If more reviews are available ("More reviews" / scrolling), intercepts the browser's own review-loading network calls to capture additional pages.

Because this is a real browser run (not a lightweight HTTP request), it is slower and costs more to run than a typical HTTP-based actor — budget maxReviewsPerPlace accordingly.

Input

Field	Type	Description
placeIds	array (required)	Google Maps place IDs (e.g. ChIJ67CkOzjvDogR2L42VGEgXJo) or full Google Maps place URLs.
maxReviewsPerPlace	integer	Caps reviews fetched per place (default 20). Also caps runtime/cost.
proxyConfiguration	object	Proxy settings. Datacenter works; switch to residential if you see blocking.

Output

One record per review:

Field	Description
placeId	The place this review belongs to
reviewId	Google's internal review ID (only available for reviews fetched via pagination, not the first on-page batch)
cid	Google's place CID, 0x<hi>:0x<lo> format
authorName	Reviewer's display name
authorProfileUrl	Link to the reviewer's Google Maps profile
avatarUrl	Reviewer's avatar image URL
rating	1–5 star rating
text	Full review text
publishedAt / lastEditedAt	ISO timestamps (only available via pagination; the on-page batch only exposes a relative date like "a month ago", not parsed into an absolute timestamp)
scrapeStatus / scrapeError	success/partial/error with a message when applicable
scrapedAt	When this row was scraped

Pay-Per-Event billing

Event	When charged
actor-start	Once per run.
review-scraped	Once per review successfully scraped.

This actor runs a real browser per place, so price both events higher than a typical HTTP-based scraper to cover the extra compute cost — check current Apify Store "Google Maps Reviews" actor pricing before finalizing.

Running locally

$apify run --purge

Put a test input in storage/key_value_stores/default/INPUT.json, e.g.:

{
  "placeIds": ["ChIJ67CkOzjvDogR2L42VGEgXJo"],
  "maxReviewsPerPlace": 10,
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true }
}