Google Places API - downloading user reviews and star ratings

Question

TL;DR - I need help using Google Places API to download star ratings and user reviews of multiple stores and I am too dumb to figure out what I am suppose to be doing. Please help!

For the life of me, this has been hard to find any sort of useful info or documentation in terms of trying to download user ratings and star reviews from multiple locations. Just to give you a bit of info, I work for a company that has three major brands with over 500 stores across the country. We have multiple listings and our senior stakeholders are wanting to get their hands on what our customers are saying about our brand and particularly see who are top performing stores are (and who are NOT are top performers) in the form of star ratings and user reviews.

Now to get those sorts of insights is pretty easy to do for one location, but for multiple? It seems Google doesn't have that feature on hand.

According to the Google Community, I would need to use Google My Business API (see thread 1 ) However Google Support told me that for what I am looking to do required Google Places API. So after heading over there, I found this which makes this the most possible way I can get what I need Google Places API

Now I am stuck at the part about loading libraries. Darnit, surely there is a way I can just make an API request to get what I want, no?

I am throwing myself on the mercy of you smart people (I have the basic knowledge and I am a person who learns by doing) so your assistances will be deeply appreciated.

Answer 1

Using Places API web service you can get up to 5 reviews when you execute a place detail request. Rating is also available in the response.

Please have a look at the documentation:

https://developers.google.com/places/web-service/details#PlaceDetailsResults

Currently, there is no way to get more than 5 reviews in Places API. You can see a feature request in the public issue tracker, however, it looks like Google didn't set a high priority on this task:

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35825957

If you are the owner of the place in Google My Business, you can use Google My Business API to retrieve a list of all reviews for your place:

https://developers.google.com/my-business/content/review-data

Hope it helps!