What Is a Reviews API? A Guide for Product Teams

A reviews API collects reviews from sites like Google Maps, Yelp and Tripadvisor and returns them in one consistent format. Your product gets the reviews; you don't build or maintain the scrapers behind them.

If you run a reputation platform, a CX tool, a marketplace or a local SEO agency, reviews are part of your product. Getting them is the hard part.

Why collecting reviews is harder than it looks

Every review site shows reviews differently. Each one has its own page layout, its own way of paging through older reviews, its own date formats and its own rating scale. And they change, often without warning.

A team that builds its own collectors ends up maintaining one scraper per site, and every site change becomes an incident. The work never finishes, and it rarely has anything to do with the product the team is meant to be building.

What a reviews API does

You tell the API which business you care about and which review site to collect from. It does the rest:

1. Finds the listing for that business on that site.
2. Collects the reviews: the rating, the text, the author and the date.
3. Normalises them into the same fields, whichever site they came from.
4. Delivers them to you, by webhook, file or API.

Because every review arrives in the same structure, your code handles Google reviews and Booking.com reviews the same way.

How delivery works with ReviewLake

With ReviewLake you submit a location over a REST call, using your own location ID, so there are no mapping tables to keep in sync.

POST /api/v1/request-reviews

When the reviews are ready, we send a signed webhook with links to JSON Lines files. Every call is HMAC-signed and carries an event ID you can deduplicate on, and failed deliveries are retried. If you'd rather pull than be pushed to, you can poll the API instead.

Full history first, then only what's new

The first run for a location can collect its full review history, so a new customer starts with everything. Later runs return only the reviews posted since, so you never re-process what you already have. That pattern suits both onboarding new customers and keeping existing ones current.

Which sites can you cover?

ReviewLake covers 20 review sites across maps, travel, food delivery, workplaces and app stores, including Google Maps, Yelp, Tripadvisor, Trustpilot, Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb, OpenTable, Uber Eats, Glassdoor, the Apple App Store and Google Play. If you need a site that isn't on the list, ask us.

Is it legal?

ReviewLake collects only reviews that are publicly visible, without logging in, and collects no private data. How you use the reviews is governed by the laws where you operate and by each site's terms, so check your use case with your own legal advisers.

When to use a reviews API

Use one when reviews matter to your product but scrapers aren't your product. If you'd rather spend engineering time on reports, alerts, AI replies or benchmarks than on fixing broken collectors, a reviews API is the shorter path.

Get API access and we'll set up a trial on your real locations.