Google Maps Reviews Monitor: New Review Alerts

Get every new Google Maps review for the places you care about — your own locations and your competitors' — as clean structured data, and pay only for the reviews that are actually new.

You give this Actor a list of Google Maps place URLs. On every run it checks each place's newest reviews and delivers only the reviews no earlier run has seen: star rating, full review text, the reviewer's public display name, the review date, the owner's response when there is one, and the review language when Google provides it. Schedule it daily and it becomes a quiet new-review alert feed for one location or a whole chain — no more refreshing Google Maps by hand, and no paying for the same reviews twice.

What it does

• Monitors any Google Maps place — restaurants, hotels, shops, clinics, dealerships, your competitors down the street. If it has a Google Maps page, it can be monitored.
• Delta-only delivery. With a monitor state store attached, each run delivers only genuinely new reviews. A day with no new reviews produces an empty result and costs nothing.
• Complete review records. Rating, full text (rating-only reviews are delivered too, without a text field), reviewer display name, exact timestamp when the feed carries one, owner responses with their dates, and language.
• Per-place resilience. If one place fails (a bad URL, a temporary Google block), that place produces one error record and the rest of the run continues. The final SUMMARY record tells you exactly what happened per category: places checked, fetched OK, empty, blocked and errored, reviews fetched, new reviews delivered, duplicates skipped.
• Gentle by design. One place at a time, paced requests, no login, no API key, no proxies.

How monitoring works

1. First run. Without a store — or the first time a place is seen — the run delivers the place's current newest reviews as a baseline batch (charged normally), so you start with data, not an empty feed. Prefer to start silently? Turn on Start monitoring silently (monitorOnlyNew) and the first run only remembers the current reviews; delivery starts with the next new review.
2. Attach a store. Pick any of your Apify key-value stores in the Monitor state store input. The Actor keeps one small record in it: which review IDs it has already seen for each place.
3. Schedule it. Run it daily (or hourly for very busy places) with the same store. Every run fetches each place's newest reviews — the window size is yours to set — diffs them against the store, delivers only the new ones, and updates the store.
4. Size the window to your schedule. Only reviews inside the checked window can be detected as new. The default window of 40 newest reviews per place comfortably covers a daily check of a busy restaurant. For a weekly check of a very busy place, raise it (up to 200).

Inputs

Input	Type	Description
placeUrls	array of strings (required)	The Google Maps places to monitor. Open each place on Google Maps and paste its URL — the full URL from the address bar, or its share link. Up to 50 places per run.
reviewsPerPlacePerRun	integer, 10–200 (default 40)	How many of each place's newest reviews are fetched and diffed per run. Checking is free; you pay only for new reviews delivered.
monitorOnlyNew	boolean (default false)	When true, the first run for a place silently remembers its current reviews instead of delivering a baseline batch. Only reviews posted afterwards are ever delivered.
monitorStore	key-value store (optional)	The store that remembers seen reviews across runs — this is what makes only-new delivery work. Without it, every run is a full baseline run.

Outputs

Every run writes three kinds of records to the dataset:

review records — one per NEW review (the charged records):

Field	Meaning
placeName	The place's name as Google Maps shows it
placeId	The place's Google feature ID (0x…:0x…, from its Maps URL)
placeIdChIJ	The same place ID in ChIJ form (Places API form)
placeUrl	The place URL as supplied in the input
reviewId	The review's unique Google ID
rating	Star rating, 1–5
reviewText	The full review text (omitted for rating-only reviews)
reviewerName	The reviewer's public display name, exactly as published with the review
reviewDate	ISO timestamp when the feed carries an exact time; otherwise Google's relative wording verbatim (e.g. "2 months ago")
reviewTimestampMs	Exact publish time in Unix milliseconds, when available
ownerResponse / ownerResponseDate	The owner's public response and its date, when the owner has responded
language	The review's language code (e.g. en), when Google states one

error records — one per place that could not be checked (never charged), with the reason; blocked: true marks places Google rate-limited or refused, so you can tell a block apart from a place that simply had no new reviews.

One summary record at the end of every run (never charged): per-category counts (places checked / fetched OK / empty / blocked / errored, reviews fetched, new delivered, duplicates skipped, silently seeded), whether a state store was used, whether the run stopped at your maximum charge or the platform timeout, and notes about the run.

Pricing

$0.01 per new review delivered. No start fee, no per-run fee, no charge for checking.

• Already-seen reviews: free (skipped as duplicates).
• A run where nothing is new: free.
• Error and SUMMARY records: free.
• Higher Apify pricing tiers pay less automatically: SILVER $0.0085, GOLD/PLATINUM/DIAMOND $0.007 per new review.

What that means in practice:

• One restaurant, daily checks: a typical independent restaurant gets ~5–20 new Google reviews a week → roughly $0.20–$0.80 per month.
• A 25-location chain, daily checks: suppose each location averages 2 new reviews a day. That's 25 × 2 × 30 = 1,500 new reviews a month → $15/month ($12.75 at SILVER, $10.50 at GOLD) for a complete, hands-off new-review feed across the whole estate.
• Competitor watching: add your five nearest competitors to the same run; you pay only for their new reviews too — typically a few dollars a month to never miss what customers are saying about them.

Limits — the honest list

• Google changes its internals. This Actor reads the same public review feed that Google Search's local panel displays. Google reshapes that feed from time to time; when it does, places may temporarily return errors instead of reviews. Breakage is watched for in a weekly portfolio review and fixed as part of the Actor's maintenance — affected runs show per-place error records (never silently empty results), and you are never charged for them.
• The window is a window. Only the newest reviewsPerPlacePerRun reviews per place are diffed. If a place receives more new reviews than the window between two runs, the overflow ages out of the window undetected. Size the window to your schedule (see above).
• Dates. The feed normally carries an exact timestamp and reviewDate is then an ISO timestamp. If a payload ever lacks one, the field falls back to Google's relative wording ("a week ago") verbatim rather than inventing a date.
• Place URLs. The URL must identify one specific place (the URL of the place's own Maps page, or its share link). A search-results URL or a bare place name cannot be monitored — the run reports that place as an error record and continues with the rest.
• Busy first runs. A baseline run delivers the whole current window (default 40 reviews per place). That is a one-off cost of $0.40 per place at the default window — or use monitorOnlyNew to start from zero for free.

Legal and data

• Public, logged-out data only. The Actor reads reviews that Google publishes to any logged-out visitor through its own search local panel. It uses no account, no login, no API key, and it does not solve CAPTCHAs or bypass any access control; if Google refuses a request, the place is reported as blocked and the run moves on.
• Reviewer names as published. A reviewer's display name is part of the public review as Google publishes it, and it is the only reviewer field this Actor emits. Reviewer profile URLs, profile photos, contributor IDs and every other piece of reviewer metadata present in the raw feed are deliberately never read into the output. No email addresses, phone numbers or contact details of any kind are collected — there is no profile enrichment, ever.
• Legitimate interest. Monitor places you have a legitimate interest in: your own business locations, your employer's, your clients', or competitors you lawfully track for market awareness. You are responsible for using the delivered data in line with the laws that apply to you (including privacy and platform terms), and for not using reviewer names to contact or profile individuals.
• This Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google.

Tips

• Start with the prefilled demo (Googleplex, Katz's Delicatessen, the New York Marriott Marquis) to see real output immediately, then swap in your own places.
• One store per monitoring setup. Different place lists can share a store safely (state is kept per place), but keeping one store per business keeps things tidy.
• Pair it with a schedule + webhook (Apify supports both) to turn new reviews into alerts in Slack, email or your CRM the moment they land.