Google Maps Review Scraper — Apify Actor

Scrape Google Maps reviews for any business at scale. Extract reviewer names, star ratings, review text, and review dates — all from a single business name query.

What does Google Maps Review Scraper do?

This Actor searches Google Maps for a business by name, navigates to its review section, and extracts all available reviews. It handles consent banners, lazy-loaded review lists, and rating-only reviews (no text) gracefully.

Key features

• Search by business name — just provide the name, no URL needed
• Extracts rich review data — reviewer name, star rating, review text, and time of review
• Handles rating-only reviews — reviews without text are captured with an empty review field instead of failing
• Residential proxy support — uses Apify residential proxies to avoid IP blocks
• Resource-efficient — blocks images, fonts, and media to minimize bandwidth and speed up scraping
• Anti-detection built in — custom user agent, disabled automation flags, and browser sandboxing

Output

Each scraped review is stored as a JSON object in the default Apify dataset:

{
  "Reviewer": "John Doe",
  "Rating": "5 stars",
  "Review": "Excellent service, highly recommend!",
  "Time of Review": "a month ago"
}

Field	Type	Description
Reviewer	string	Name of the reviewer
Rating	string	Star rating label (e.g. "5 stars", "3 stars")
Review	string	Review text (empty string if rating-only review)
Time of Review	string	Relative time (e.g. "a month ago", "2 years ago")

Input parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
query	string	"ABC Business"	The business name to search on Google Maps
maxReviews	integer	5000	Maximum number of reviews to extract
scrollPasses	integer	50	Number of scroll passes to load more reviews (increase for businesses with many reviews)
useProxy	boolean	true	Whether to use Apify residential proxy (recommended)

Example input

{
  "query": "TPM Consultants Pvt Ltd",
  "maxReviews": 300,
  "scrollPasses": 20,
  "useProxy": true
}

How it works

1. Navigates to Google Maps and handles any cookie consent banners
2. Searches for the business by typing the query into the search box
3. Clicks the "Reviews" tab on the business listing
4. Scrolls through the review list to lazy-load all reviews (controlled by scrollPasses)
5. Extracts reviewer name, star rating, review text, and time of review from each review card
6. Pushes each review to the Apify dataset

Proxy configuration

The Actor uses Apify residential proxies (US-based by default) to reduce the chance of being blocked by Google. Proxy is enabled by default and can be disabled by setting useProxy to false in the input.

Tips for best results

• Increase scrollPasses for businesses with hundreds of reviews — each pass loads roughly 10–15 more reviews
• Set maxReviews to cap the output if you only need a sample
• Residential proxy is recommended — Google Maps aggressively blocks datacenter IPs

Technology stack

• Apify SDK for Python — Actor lifecycle and dataset management
• Playwright — headless Chromium browser automation
• emoji — emoji cleanup from review text

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.