Blog / 11 November 2026 · 3 min read
Google Reviews API: Why You Only Get 5 Reviews, and Your Options
If you've tried to pull Google reviews through the Places API, you've probably hit the same wall as everyone else. You ask for a place's reviews and get five back. There's no next page.
That's by design. Google has two official routes to reviews, and they answer different questions. Knowing which is which saves a lot of time.
Route 1: the Places API (any business, five reviews)
The Places API works for any business on Google Maps. It isn't built for review collection, though.
- Places API (New) returns "up to five user-submitted Review objects" for a place, sorted by relevance. There's no sort parameter and no pagination. (Place Details)
- The legacy Places API also returns "up to five reviews", but lets you sort by
most_relevantornewest. (Legacy Place Details)
Sorting by newest helps a little: you get the latest five. But a busy restaurant can collect more than five reviews in a weekend, so polling gaps lose reviews for good.
There are display and storage rules too. You must credit each review's author, link to the original review on Google Maps, and say how the reviews are ordered. Caching is limited to what Google's service terms allow. (Places API policies)
Good for: showing a handful of recent reviews next to a place in your app. Not good for: history, analytics, monitoring or anything that needs every review.
Route 2: the Business Profile API (all reviews, your own locations)
The Google Business Profile API can "list all reviews of a location" and "reply to a specific review", in pages of up to 50. (Business Profile reviews docs)
The catch is access. The location must be verified, the call needs the business.manage OAuth scope, and getting API access requires managing a verified profile that has been active for 60 days or more. (Prerequisites) In practice that means locations you or your customer own or manage.
Good for: reputation and reply tools working on behalf of the business owner. Not good for: competitor tracking, market research, or any location your customer hasn't connected.
The gap between them
Put the two together and you have a gap that many products fall into:
| You need | Places API | Business Profile API |
|---|---|---|
| Reviews for any business | Yes | No, only managed locations |
| More than five reviews | No | Yes |
| Full history | No | Yes |
| Reply to reviews | No | Yes |
If you need every review for locations you don't manage, such as competitors, prospects or a whole market, neither official API covers it.
Your options
- Live with five. This is fine if all you do is display a few recent reviews.
- Use the Business Profile API for connected customers, and accept that you can't see anything else.
- Page through search results. Search-results APIs return reviews one billed request per page, so a full history costs hundreds of calls, and you repeat them every time you check for new ones. (See ReviewLake vs SerpApi.)
- Use a reviews API that collects the full public history for any location once, then sends only new reviews after that.
Only the last option gets you every review, for any location, without a growing pile of requests. ReviewLake covers both cases. For any location it collects public Google reviews, with full history on the first run and only new reviews afterwards. For locations your customers own, they can connect their Business Profile, and replies post straight back through the same API. Google sits alongside 50+ other review sites in the same format.
If you're building for multi-location brands, see reviews for retail and multi-location brands.
Official API details checked against Google's developer documentation on 11 November 2026.