How to scrape Google Maps Reviews

Google Maps is the most popular navigation platform and Google Maps Reviews provides huge customer experience insights for businesses.

With Google Maps Reviews data, you can analyze competitors' reviews, get insight from their strengths and weaknesses.

Monitoring and analyzing your business's reviews also helps you manage your online reputation.

Besides the reviews from customers, Google Maps Reviews can tell you whether it's opening new locations, local hours, changing pricing models, ... and more.

Google Maps Reviews is the most difficult data to scrape. For most scrapers, it's slow or getting incorrect results. But with SerpApi, you have both performance and correct data from Google Maps Reviews.

Setting up a SerpApi account

SerpApi offers a free plan for newly created accounts. Head to the sign-up page to register an account and complete your first search with our interactive playground. When you want to do more searches with us, please visit the pricing page.

Once you are familiar with all results, you can utilize SERP APIs using your API Key.

Scrape your first Google Maps Reviews with SerpApi

Head to the Google Maps Reviews from the documentation on SerpApi for details.

In this tutorial, we will scrape and extract reviews from a Starbucks coffee shop. The data contains: "position", "link", "rating", "date", "user_name", "description", "likes", and more. You can also scrape more information with SerpApi.

First, you need to install the SerpApi client library.

pip install google-search-results

Set up the SerpApi credentials and search.

from serpapi import GoogleSearch
import os, json

params = {
    'api_key': 'YOUR_API_KEY',         # your serpapi api
    'engine': 'google_maps_reviews',    # SerpApi search engine	
    'data_id': '0x89e8106d2f42a4df:0xd8c06afef7c3d3f2'
}

To retrieve the Google Maps Reviews reviews for a given search query, you can use the following code:

results = GoogleSearch(params).get_dict()['reviews']

You can store Google Maps Reviews reviews JSON data in databases or export them to a CSV file.

import csv

header = ['link', 'rating', 'date', 'user_name', 'description', 'likes']

with open('google_maps_reviews.csv', 'w', encoding='UTF8', newline='') as f:
    writer = csv.writer(f)

    writer.writerow(header)

    for item in results:
        print(item)
        writer.writerow([item.get('link'), item.get('rating'), item.get('date'), item.get('user', {}).get('name'), item.get('snippet'), item.get('likes')])

This example is using Python, you can use your favorite programming languages likes Ruby, NodeJS, Java, PHP....

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.