The Google Reviews API returns five reviews. Here is what to do instead.

If you have tried to pull your Google reviews programmatically, you have met the wall: the API hands back five reviews, and there is no page two. No parameter changes it. This is not a bug, and it is not something you are doing wrong.

Here is what is actually available, and what each option costs you.

What the Places API gives you

The Place Details endpoint accepts a reviews field and returns up to five reviews for the place. Google decides which five. You can nudge the ordering between “most relevant” and “newest”, but the count stays at five.

There is a second catch that matters more than the first. Google’s terms let you cache place content only briefly — the place ID is the one value you are allowed to keep indefinitely. A product that stores review text in its own database for display is not doing what the Places terms describe, which rules the API out as the backing store for a review archive.

So the Places API works for one thing: showing a small “recent reviews” strip that you re-fetch each time. It does not work for building a library of every review your business has ever received.

Option 1: the Google Business Profile API

This is the official way to read all of your reviews, and it is free.

The catch is ownership. The Business Profile API only returns reviews for listings the authenticated account manages. You connect your Google account, grant access, and from then on the reviews — including your replies to them — are available in full.

• Good for: a business showing its own reviews on its own website.
• Not good for: showing reviews for a business you do not manage, such as a partner, a chain member or a competitor comparison.
• Extra step: Google reviews API access requests before granting production access, so plan for the application to take days rather than minutes.

If you own the listing, this is the right answer and you should not pay anyone for the data.

Option 2: a data provider

Services such as Outscraper collect Google Maps data and sell it through an API. You pass a business name or place ID and get the full review list back, usually with a unique id per review, which makes deduplication straightforward.

• Good for: any business, whether or not you manage the listing; getting thousands of historical reviews in one call.
• Cost: per request. At a daily refresh per business this is small, but it is not zero, so match the interval to how often the business actually receives reviews. A dental practice getting two reviews a month does not need an hourly check.

Option 3: scraping it yourself

Technically possible, and a bad idea. It violates Google’s terms of service, the markup changes without warning, and you will spend your evenings on IP blocks instead of on your product. The provider in option 2 is really just someone else absorbing that maintenance for a fee.

How we do it in ReviewSlider

We use a provider for the initial import, because a business with 1,300 reviews wants all 1,300 on day one, not the five Google is willing to show. Reviews are then stored in your own collection, where you approve what appears on your site.

For the recurring fetch, the interval is yours to set — daily, weekly or monthly — and every fetch is deduplicated against what you already have, so a quiet week costs one request and writes nothing.

The direction of travel is the Business Profile connection: free, complete, and official for every customer who manages their own listing. A data provider stays as the fallback for the cases where nobody does.

The short version

What you need	Use
Five newest reviews, always fresh	Places API
Every review of a listing you own	Business Profile API
Every review of any listing	A data provider
A weekend of debugging	Your own scraper

If your goal is your own reviews on your own site, start with the Business Profile route — and if you would rather not build any of it, ReviewSlider does the collecting, the approving and the embedding for €5.90 a month.