How to export Google reviews to a spreadsheet, branch by branch

Google Business Profile has no button that exports reviews, so to export Google reviews you need the Business Profile API, a scraper, or a tool built on one of those two. For a single branch with a few dozen reviews, copying them into a sheet by hand is fine; past that, the right route depends on how many locations you run and whether Google has approved you for API access.

What Google's own downloads give you

Business Profile does have a bulk download, and it is easy to mistake for a review export. Google's help page on downloading your Business Profiles to a spreadsheet lets you select several profiles, open Actions and download them as a file, with optional Google updates and photos. The page describes profile data such as opening hours and phone numbers. Reviews are not among the options it lists.

Google Takeout is the other tool people mention. It is Google's general archive of your account data, and its help page names products such as email and photos. We could not find a Google page that documents what a Takeout archive holds for a Business Profile, so if you try it, test one profile first and check that every branch and every date you need is in the file.

Route 1: the Business Profile API

The cleanest export comes from Google's own API, which returns the reviews for each location you manage. The reviews list method returns up to 50 reviews per page, newest update first unless you ask for rating order. Each response also carries the location's average rating and total review count, which gives you a check figure for every branch: if your file holds 380 reviews for a site and the API reports 412, something was missed.

Access is the catch. Google's API prerequisites ask every applicant to manage a profile that is "verified and active for 60+ days", then apply through a contact form and wait for a reply. You can tell whether a project has been approved from its quota in Google Cloud Console. A quota of 0 queries per minute means not yet; 300 means approved.

Once you are in, the numbers are friendly. A group of 20 branches averaging 400 reviews each holds 8,000 reviews, which is 160 pages of 50. After that first pull you only ask for what changed.

Route 2: the Places API, for a preview only

Google Maps Platform's Places API also returns reviews and works from a place ID, so you do not need to manage the profile. Its limit rules it out for exports. The Places API reference says "A maximum of 5 reviews can be returned" for each place, sorted by relevance. That is enough for a website widget and far too little for a spreadsheet.

Route 3: a scraper billed per review

Most export tools collect reviews by scraping Google Maps. You give them a list of place URLs or place IDs and get a file back. Apify's Google Maps Reviews Scraper is one example, priced "from $0.30 / 1,000 scraped reviews", and Apify's free plan includes $5 of usage credit a month.

At that headline rate, the 8,000-review estate above would cost about $2.40 for the first full pull. Treat that as an estimate. Apify prices this scraper per event and lists each event on its pricing tab, so check the figure against a small test run before you point it at every branch. Later pulls cost far less, because an incremental pull only asks for reviews added since the last one.

Which route fits your estate

• One or two branches and a one-off need: copy and paste, or a single scraper run.
• Several branches, no API approval yet: a scraper, run incrementally after the first pull.
• API access approved: the Business Profile API, which also lets you post replies from the same connection.
• More than a handful of branches that you report on monthly: a review tool that runs the pulls for you, so nobody has to remember.

The API reply point comes from Google's own review data guide, which covers listing reviews, replying to them and deleting replies through the same interface.

The columns a multi-branch export needs

Whichever route you take, the file is only useful if every row says which branch it belongs to and can be matched against next month's pull. Insist on these columns:

• Branch name plus the place ID or API location ID, so two sites with similar names never merge.
• Review ID, the one field that lets you remove duplicates when pulls overlap.
• Star rating and the full review text.
• Reviewer name as Google displays it.
• Date posted and date last updated, kept as two separate columns.
• Your reply text and reply date, left blank where you have not answered.

The two dates matter more than they look. The API's review resource carries both a create time and an update time, and Google's review help page explains why: customers can change their review after reading your reply, and "the date on their review will change to show when the latest update was made." A file with one date column can make a two-year-old complaint look like last week's.

Then add your own working columns: sentiment, the topics each review raises, and any team member it names. Those are what turn a list into analysis, which we cover in how to analyse Google reviews by branch.

Keeping the file current without paying twice

Pull incrementally. After the first full export, ask only for reviews newer than the latest update you already hold, append them, then remove duplicates by review ID. With the API's default newest-first order you can stop paging once the update times fall before your last pull. With a scraper the same habit is where the saving sits, since you pay for every review returned.

Two small habits save hours later. Save CSV files as UTF-8 with a byte-order mark, or Excel on Windows may garble accented names and the pound sign. Keep each month's raw export untouched in its own file, too, so if a review later vanishes from Google you still have its text and date. Our guide to why Google reviews disappear explains why that copy is worth keeping, and the multi-location review routine shows where the export fits in a weekly rhythm.

Exporting Google reviews with Loculens

Loculens is the Braivex review workspace that runs these pulls for every branch. You connect the Google account that manages your Business Profile, or add each location's Place ID and connect your own Apify account so scraping is billed to you directly. A nightly sync fetches only what is new. The month's spend sits in the dashboard footer, and a cap you set refuses any run that would go past it.

Every list in the workspace exports to CSV. The review export carries the location, date, rating, sentiment, topics, team members mentioned and a link back to each review on Google, and the file opens cleanly in Excel. Filter to one branch or a date range first and you export exactly that list.

Plans start at $39 a month for up to 5 locations and 2,500 reviews synced a month, billed in US dollars excluding tax. The quickest test is your own estate: start a 14-day Loculens trial with no card, add your locations, run the first sync and export the result.