The official Google places API limits the amount of the reviews you can scrape from it to 5 reviews only. Despite many developers asking for pagination and sorting parameters since 2015 the limitation still exists. Fortunately, there are some tools you can use from your code to get ratings & reviews in the right way.
Outscraper Google Maps Reviews API is one of them.
With Outscraper’s API, you can scrape any amount of reviews from any business. You can sort the reviews, and paginate over the pages. It’s possible to ignore empty reviews by using the “ignoreEmpty” parameter and there are many advanced parameters like cutoff, cutoffRating, etc.
The basic example of scraping 20 reviews by the default sorting (most relevant reviews).
# fetch 20 most relevant reviews
curl -X GET "https://api.app.outscraper.com/maps/reviews-v2?query=PLACE_ID&reviewsLimit=20&async=false" -H "X-API-KEY: API_KEY"The sort parameter might be one of the following: “most_relevant” (default), “newest”, “highest_rating”, and “lowest_rating”.
# fetch reviews with highest rating first
curl -X GET "https://api.app.outscraper.com/maps/reviews-v2?query=PLACE_ID&reviewsLimit=20&sort=highest_rating&async=false" -H "X-API-KEY: API_KEY"# fetch reviews with lowest rating first
curl -X GET "https://api.app.outscraper.com/maps/reviews-v2?query=PLACE_ID&reviewsLimit=20&sort=lowest_rating&async=false" -H "X-API-KEY: API_KEY"
In addition to the reviewsLimit parameter you can specify cutoffRating. The parameter specifies the maximum for “lowest_rating” or the minimum for “highest_rating” rating for reviews.
# fetch reviews with 5 and 4 stars ratings only
curl -X GET "https://api.app.outscraper.com/maps/reviews-v2?query=PLACE_ID&reviewsLimit=1000&sort=highest_rating&cutoffRating=4&async=false" -H "X-API-KEY: API_KEY"The cutoff parameter will help you to scrape only the newest reviews till the specific date in the past. Might be helpful when you have all the reviews in your database and want to scrape only the reviews that were added since your last update.
# fetch reviews till the specific date (cutoff)
curl -X GET "https://api.app.outscraper.com/maps/reviews-v2?query=PLACE_ID&reviewsLimit=250&sort=newest&cutoff=1629269269&async=false" -H "X-API-KEY: API_KEY"There is build-in pagination that you can use to scrape many pages of reviews. Use the skip parameter to control where API begins returning results.
# page 1, sorted by newest
curl -X GET "https://api.app.outscraper.com/maps/reviews-v2?query=PLACE_ID&reviewsLimit=20&sort=newest&async=false" -H "X-API-KEY: API_KEY"# page 2, sorted by newest
curl -X GET "https://api.app.outscraper.com/maps/reviews-v2?query=PLACE_ID&reviewsLimit=20&sort=newest&skip=20async=false" -H "X-API-KEY: API_KEY"
Scraping many reviews in one request might take time. In order to prevent a timeout error from the webserver, it’s recommended to use async requests. This way you will submit your requests to Outscraper and retrieve them later (usually within 1–3 minutes, depends on the amount of reviews) with the Request Results endpoint.
A good practice is to send async requests and starting checking the results at 15-sec intervals. Check out this Python implementation if necessary.
# step 1: submit the task and get request id
curl -X GET "https://api.app.outscraper.com/maps/reviews-v2?query=PLACE_ID_1&reviewsLimit=2000&sort=newest&async=true" -H "X-API-KEY: API_KEY"# step 2: retrieve the task results later (usually within 1-3 minutes, depends on the amount of reviews)
curl -X GET "https://api.app.outscraper.com/requests/REQUEST_ID"
Outscraper’s pricing model is pay as you go and monthly usage is billed. There are 3 different tiers for pricing. Free tier, medium tier and business tier. Results up to the first 500 reviews are free within the free tier.
Visit Outscraper Google Maps Reviews API page for more details:
