Google Reviews Monitor — Multi-Location Alerts & Reports

Google Reviews Monitor: watch every branch's Google reviews and get only what changed

Give it a labelled list of your Google Business locations and it checks each one on a schedule, remembers what it saw last time, and reports only the new and changed reviews. It flags low-star reviews, spots when your overall rating drops, and can draft a public reply for the urgent ones.

Get the shape clear before you wire anything up. The dataset holds one row per location, not one row per review. That row carries the counts, the rating change, the themes and the urgent reviews in full. Every review it has ever seen goes to a named store and a named dataset on your own account, not into the run's dataset.

🔔 What Google Reviews Monitor does

Each branch is its own Google Business profile, and a bad week at one of them is easy to miss when you have twenty. So this checks them all and tells you what moved.

Deltas, not re-dumps. Each run reports what appeared or changed since the previous run. State lives in a named key-value store, reviews-monitor-state, on your account, and the per-review change records go to a named dataset, reviews-monitor-history.

What counts as a change. A new review. An edited one. A review going from unanswered to answered. A fall in the location's overall star rating.

Alerts. Put a Slack or Discord incoming webhook in webhookUrl and you get a short summary when something moved. Anything else gets plain JSON, which is what Zapier, Make and n8n want.

The AI part is optional and runs on your key. Summaries and drafts come from new or changed reviews only, never from history.

📥 What you give it

{
  "locations": [
    {
      "clientName": "Acme Coffee, Downtown",
      "googleMapsUrl": "https://www.google.com/maps/place/Acme+Coffee/@40.7185,-73.9571,17z/data=!4m7..."
    }
  ],
  "maxReviewsPerRun": 10,
  "onlyNewSinceLastRun": true,
  "negativeRatingThreshold": 3,
  "webhookUrl": ""
}

Copy the Maps link out of your browser's address bar, the long /maps/place/... one. A short ?q=place_id: link does not identify the branch well enough here: two locations in that form are tracked as though they were the same place, which gives wrong new-review counts on both.

trackOwnerReplies is read from the form and then not used. Reply detection happens anyway, so leaving it on costs nothing, but switching it off switches nothing off.

📤 What you get back

One row per location, per run.

A real row from a recent run. This one is a location whose reviews feed would not load:

{
  "target": "gmaps:url:www.google.com/maps/place/",
  "clientName": "Example ... Googleplex",
  "syncStatus": "failed",
  "error": "Reviews feed did not load (possible anti-bot block or layout change).",
  "counts": { "new": 0, "changed": 0, "negative": 0, "unanswered": 0, "urgent": 0 },
  "ratingChange": { "before": null, "after": null, "delta": null, "dropped": false },
  "urgentReviews": [],
  "themes": [],
  "agencySummary": "Could not fetch this location (Reviews feed did not load ...).",
  "hasSignal": false,
  "reportUrl": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/gm788eATqwJOTwG8y/records/latest-report.html?signature=..."
}

🧾 Reading the output

Filter your alerting on hasSignal. A quiet run writes a row per location with hasSignal: false and empty counts, which is normal and not a fault.

The first run for a location is a baseline: it loads the newest reviews to learn what is there, reports isFirstRun: true, sends no webhook, and processes every review it loaded. Keep maxReviewsPerRun small on that first run unless you want the backfill.

A failed location keeps its saved state, so the next run picks the same changes up.

▶️ How to run it

1. Open Google Reviews Monitor and click Try for free. 2. Open each branch on Google Maps, copy the address-bar link, and add it to Client locations to monitor with your own label. 3. Leave Max reviews to load per location at 10, or raise it once for a backfill. 4. Paste a Slack or Discord webhook into Webhook URL if you want alerts, then click Start. 5. Once the first run looks right, put it on a schedule from the Schedules tab.

💰 How much does it cost?

Flat on every Apify plan, no volume tiers.

The report charge fires once on every run while weeklyReport is on, including a quiet run and a run where no location could be read. Switch it off if you do not read the HTML report, especially on a frequent schedule.

A location that could not be read is not charged as a check. The AI text runs on your own Anthropic or OpenAI key, and that provider bills you for the tokens.

💡 What people use it for

• An agency watching every client's branches and getting one Slack message a morning.
• A franchise spotting the one site whose rating slipped half a star this week.
• A support team pulling urgentReviews straight into a queue, with a draft reply attached.
• Keeping a record of what changed, by reading the named history dataset rather than the run.

🚧 What it does not do

• It is not one row per review. The run dataset gives a row per location. Full review data lives

in your named store and history dataset.

• Google can refuse a location, and then you get a failed row instead of counts. It is not

charged as a check, and the next run tries again.

• maxReviewsPerRun accepts up to 1,000, but scrolling stops well before that. Past roughly 300

you will not get more however high you set it.

• Review dates are Google's relative wording, like 2 weeks ago. No exact timestamp exists in

that feed.

• Deleted reviews are never reported. It sees what is there, not what left.
• trackOwnerReplies does nothing. Replies are detected either way.
• The saved state never prunes, so the named store grows the longer you run it.
• A ?q=place_id: link cannot tell two locations apart. Use the full address-bar link.

🧭 Which Google scraper do you need?

❓ Questions people ask

How do I get only new reviews instead of the whole history? Every run does that. The first run is the baseline; after that you get changes only.

Can it post to Slack? Yes. Put a Slack incoming webhook in webhookUrl and the payload is formatted for it. Discord works the same way, and anything else gets plain JSON.

Do I need an AI key? Only for generateAiSummary and generateReplyDrafts. Monitoring, alerts and rating-drop detection work without one.

Where are the individual reviews? In urgentReviews on the row, and in the named reviews-monitor-history dataset on your account for everything else.

Can an AI assistant run it? Yes, through Apify's MCP server: https://mcp.apify.com/?actors=dami_studio/google-reviews-monitor.

Is monitoring Google reviews legal? These are public reviews, and they carry personal data that GDPR and similar laws cover, so have a reason for keeping it. Apify's write-up on scraping and the law is a good starting point, and we are not lawyers.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Send the run ID and the Maps link of the location that misbehaved. The error text on a failed row usually names the problem on its own.