Most businesses interact with their Google reviews through the Business Profile interface or a third-party review management platform. But under the hood, Google exposes an API that allows programmatic access to review data and responses. If you're a developer building tools for clients, a business with a technical team, or a company evaluating what review platforms can actually do with Google's data, understanding the API is worth your time.
Google Business Profile API Overview
The Google Business Profile API (formerly the My Business API) provides access to the data that underlies your Google Business Profile, including business information, posts, and reviews.
The API is RESTful, uses JSON, and is authenticated via OAuth 2.0. It's available to businesses directly and to third-party developers who build applications for business management.
Key capabilities:
- Read reviews (all reviews for a location, with filter and pagination options)
- Post responses to reviews
- Update responses to reviews
- Delete responses to reviews
Key limitations:
- You cannot create or submit new reviews via the API — Google prohibits programmatic review creation
- You cannot delete reviews via the API (only flag them for policy violations through the standard interface)
- You cannot access aggregate rating data directly — it must be derived from individual review data
The Reviews Endpoint
The primary review endpoint is structured around location IDs. Each Google Business Profile location has a unique location ID, and reviews are retrieved on a per-location basis.
A read request to the reviews endpoint returns:
{
"reviews": [
{
"name": "accounts/.../locations/.../reviews/...",
"reviewId": "...",
"reviewer": {
"displayName": "Customer Name",
"isAnonymous": false
},
"starRating": "FIVE",
"comment": "Review text here...",
"createTime": "2025-06-01T14:00:00Z",
"updateTime": "2025-06-01T14:00:00Z",
"reviewReply": null
}
],
"totalReviewCount": 142,
"averageRating": 4.6
}
Star ratings are returned as string enums (ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE) rather than numeric values, which is worth noting if you're building a system that does arithmetic on them.
The reviewReply field is null if no response has been posted, or contains the response text and creation timestamp if one exists.
Authentication Requirements
Access to the Business Profile API requires OAuth 2.0 authentication. There are two primary approaches:
User-based OAuth: The business owner or manager authenticates via their Google account. The resulting access token is scoped to that account's properties. This is the standard approach for third-party applications (like review management platforms) that access client data with user permission.
Service account authentication: Used for server-to-server access. Requires that the service account is granted access to the business location through the Business Profile interface. More appropriate for internal tools where no user interaction is needed at authentication time.
The relevant OAuth scope for review access is: https://www.googleapis.com/auth/business.manage
Rate Limits and Quotas
The Business Profile API enforces quotas at the project level (your Google Cloud project) and the account level.
Key limits:
- 10 QPS (queries per second) per project by default
- Daily quota on read and write operations — exact limits depend on API tier
- Review response posts count against write quotas
- Exceeding quotas results in 429 errors
For single-location businesses accessing their own data, the default quotas are generous and unlikely to be hit. For platforms managing thousands of locations, quota management becomes a meaningful engineering consideration, and requesting quota increases from Google is often necessary.
Practical Use Cases
Custom Internal Dashboard
A multi-location operator with a development team might build an internal dashboard that pulls review data from all locations, calculates metrics, and surfaces alerts — all within their existing business intelligence infrastructure. The API makes this possible without depending on a third-party platform for the core data.
CRM Integration
Connecting review data to your CRM allows you to tag customers who left positive reviews as advocacy candidates, flag customers whose reviews suggest churn risk, and log review interactions in the customer record. This requires correlating reviewer identity (which is limited in the API) with CRM records, which usually means matching by name, phone, or email when available.
Multi-Location Monitoring
A business managing 20+ locations can build a monitoring system that pulls all location reviews on a schedule, identifies new reviews since the last pull, categorizes them by rating, and routes alerts to the appropriate regional manager — automatically, without manual checks.
What Third-Party Platforms Like Laudy Do With the API
Review management platforms use the API to:
- Pull reviews from all connected locations on a continuous basis
- Surface new reviews in a unified inbox
- Post responses on behalf of business users (with appropriate authorization)
- Calculate aggregate metrics (average rating, velocity, response rate) across locations
- Power AI response drafting with the actual review text
The platform layer exists because using the API well — handling token refresh, rate limits, error states, multi-location management, and consistent data normalization across Google plus Yelp, Facebook, and other platforms — is non-trivial engineering work that most businesses don't want to do themselves.
For businesses with development resources evaluating build vs. buy, the API is capable enough to support a robust custom implementation. For everyone else, the platform handles the complexity.
Laudy uses the Google Business Profile API to give you a reliable, always-current view of every review across all your locations — no manual checking required. Connect your profiles at /signup.