Can I download all Google reviews of a business for free?

Yes, up to a point. The first 100 reviews of any business are free to download as Excel, CSV or JSON, with no signup, no Google login and no API key. Exports run newest first, so the free 100 are the most recent 100. Places with more reviews than that need a one-time payment, never a subscription.

Is it legal to download Google reviews of a business?

Reading and saving reviews that Google shows publicly to anyone is generally lawful for research, reputation management and internal analysis. The risk lies in what you do next: republishing reviews as if they were written about you, contacting reviewers, or processing personal data without a lawful basis under rules such as the GDPR. Use the file for analysis, keep reviewer names out of anything you publish, and read Google's Maps content policy before quoting reviews.

Will the business or the reviewers know I downloaded their reviews?

No. The exporter reads the same public review list anyone sees on Google Maps while logged out. It never signs in to your Google account or anyone else's, so neither the business owner nor the reviewers get a notification, and nothing appears on the listing or in its Business Profile insights.

Which Google Maps link format works?

Any link that carries the place identity: a maps.app.goo.gl or g.page share link, a goo.gl/maps link, a Maps URL with ?cid= in it, or the long www.google.com/maps/place/ URL that includes a 0x...:0x... feature ID in its data section. A bare /maps/place/Name/@lat,lng link without that ID is rejected. Share then Copy link always gives a working one.

Can I download Google reviews to Excel directly?

Yes. Pick the Excel option and you get an .xlsx file that opens with the columns already separated and non-English text intact. CSV works too and is the better choice for Google Sheets, Looker Studio or a database import.

Why doesn't Google Takeout give me the reviews?

Takeout only exports data tied to your own Google account: reviews you wrote and, for a Business Profile you manage, data for that profile. It cannot export the reviews of a business you do not own, which is the situation most people searching for this are in.

Why does the Google Places API only return 5 reviews?

Place Details returns at most five reviews per place and has no page token to reach the sixth. It is designed to show a few reviews next to a map pin, not to deliver a review history. Paying more or raising your quota does not change the limit.

Do star-only reviews without text download too?

Yes. A rating with no words is still a review on Google, so it exports as a row with its star rating, date and reviewer, and an empty text column.

Are owner replies included in the download?

Yes. When the business has answered a review, the reply text and its date sit in the owner_reply and owner_reply_at columns on the same row, and the replies column reads 1.

Why does my file have fewer rows than the review count on Google Maps?

The badge and the review list are not the same thing. Google removes reviews it judges to break its policies, and the headline count can lag behind those removals. A file a few percent short of the badge is normal. A file far short usually means the wrong listing or a reached cap.

Can I download reviews for several locations of one business?

Yes, one place link per export. Run each branch separately and stack the files; add a location column before you combine them so you can still tell the rows apart.

Download All Google Reviews of a Business — Free Excel & CSV (2026)

If you need to download all Google reviews of a business into Excel or a CSV, Google does not give you a button for it. The listing shows a star average and a review count, and the reviews themselves sit in a scrolling panel that loads a handful at a time. This guide covers every route that exists in 2026, which one actually returns every review for a business you do not own, the exact link format to paste, and what to do with the file once you have it. It is free to start: the first 100 reviews are free, no signup.

What "all reviews" means on a Google listing

Before picking a method, it helps to know what you are trying to capture. A Google review is a star rating from 1 to 5, optionally with text, photos and an owner reply. Many reviews are rating-only: the customer tapped four stars and left. Those still count toward the badge and they still belong in your file, because a business whose last 50 reviews are silent one-star ratings has a different problem from one collecting long, angry essays.

Google also translates. A review written in Thai or Spanish is stored in its original language, and Google shows English readers a machine translation. A useful download keeps both. Finally, reviews change: owners reply weeks later, reviewers edit, and Google removes reviews that break its Maps user-generated content policy. "All" therefore means every review that is publicly visible on the day you export, not every review ever written.

Four routes Google leaves open, ranked by how much they return

1. Google Takeout and the Business Profile dashboard (owners only)

Google Takeout exports data attached to your own Google account. That covers reviews you have written and, if you manage a Business Profile, data for that profile. Owners can also read and reply to every review from the dashboard described in Google's manage customer reviews help page, and developers can page through them with the Business Profile API review endpoints. All of this requires verified ownership. None of it works for a competitor, a supplier, a hotel you are vetting, or a client who has not handed you access yet.

2. The Places API (any business, five reviews)

The Place Details endpoint works for any place, but its reviews field returns at most five, with no pagination, and you need a Google Cloud project with billing switched on before the first call. It is fine for showing a few quotes next to a map pin and useless for analysis. The details are in why the Places API only returns 5 reviews.

3. Copy and paste (any business, your afternoon)

Open the reviews panel, scroll until it stops loading, select everything, paste into a sheet. It works for a café with 30 reviews. Past a couple of hundred, the panel slows to a crawl, the paste arrives as one column of mixed names, dates, "Local Guide" labels and review text, and the star ratings do not paste at all because they are drawn as icons. You end up retyping the one field that matters most.

4. A place-link exporter (any business, every public review)

The Google Reviews exporter takes the business's Maps link and walks the full public review list, newest first, into a file with one review per row and the star rating in its own column. No Google login, no API key, and nothing touches anyone's Business Profile.

Getting a link that identifies the business

This is where most failed exports start. Google Maps produces several kinds of URL, and only some of them say which business you mean.

Works: a maps.app.goo.gl/… share link, a g.page/… link, an older goo.gl/maps/… link, any Maps URL with ?cid= in it, and the long google.com/maps/place/… URL when its data= section contains a feature ID shaped like 0x…:0x….
Does not work: a bare /maps/place/Business+Name/@13.75,100.50,17z link. That is a name and a map position, which your browser resolves by searching, and two branches of the same chain can share a name.

The reliable habit is the same on desktop and phone: open the business, tap Share, tap Copy link. That link always carries the place identity. If you paste one that does not, the exporter says so before it starts rather than failing halfway.

Download every review, step by step

Open the listing. Search the business on Google Maps and click into its own panel, not the list of results.
Copy the share link with Share → Copy link.
Paste it into the box on /export/google-reviews. The page reads the place and shows its review count before anything downloads, which is your chance to confirm it is the right branch.
Pick a format. Excel (.xlsx) if the file is going straight into Excel. CSV for Google Sheets, Looker Studio or a database. JSON if a script will read it.
Download. The first 100 reviews are free with no account. For a place with more, the rest is a one-time payment, never a subscription; current options are on the pricing page. Because the walk runs newest first, a free file always holds the latest 100, which is usually the slice you want to read first anyway.

For a ten-branch chain, repeat per branch. Each export is one place.

Opening the file in Excel without mangling it

Three things trip people up the first time.

Character encoding. Reviews arrive in every script customers write in: Thai, Arabic, Japanese, accented Portuguese, emoji. The .xlsx download keeps them intact by design. If you choose CSV and double-click it, recent Excel versions read it correctly; if yours shows garbled characters, use Data → From Text/CSV and pick UTF-8 instead of double-clicking.

Long text. Some reviews run to several paragraphs and contain line breaks. Set the text column to wrap and give it a fixed width, or the sheet turns into rows of wildly varying height. Freeze the header row while you are there.

Dates. The created_at column is a full timestamp, which Excel sorts correctly. The relative_time column holds Google's own phrasing such as "3 months ago". Keep it for reading, but never sort or chart on it.

Which columns to keep and which to delete

The download puts the shared columns first, the same ones every platform export uses, then the Google-specific fields. A Google review has no threads, handles or pinning, so a few shared columns are always empty or constant. Delete them first:

Delete: username (Google has no handle, only a display name), is_pinned (always false), reply_to_id (always empty).
Keep and use: rating, text, translated_text, language, created_at, owner_reply, owner_reply_at, likes (how many people marked the review helpful) and photo_count.
Keep for weighting: author, author_review_count, author_is_local_guide and author_local_guide_level. A one-star review from someone with 400 lifetime reviews reads differently from a first-ever review.
Keep for links: review_url opens that exact review on Maps, and photo_urls lists the attached photos.

One shortcut: the replies column is 1 when the owner answered and 0 when they did not. Average it and you have the owner's response rate in a single cell. Filter rating to 1 and 2 at the same time and you see which complaints went unanswered.

When the row count and the badge disagree

The number next to the stars on Maps is a summary, not a promise. You will regularly see a file a few rows short of the badge, and occasionally the reverse for a moment while a fresh review lands. The common causes:

Removed reviews. Google filters reviews it judges fake or off-topic, and owners can report reviews for removal. The headline count can trail those removals.
Wrong listing. Duplicate or relocated listings each hold their own reviews. If the count is far off, check the address on the export page against the branch you meant.
A cap. A free export stops at 100 by design, and the file says so rather than pretending it is complete.

A gap of a few percent is normal. A gap of half the badge is a wrong link, almost every time.

Where this guide comes from

We build and run ZocialComment, so everything above comes from operating the exporter rather than from reading about it. The link rules are the ones our URL check enforces: the bare /maps/place/Name/@lat,lng form is rejected up front because Google's review feed cannot resolve it, and we saw that failure often enough to turn it into an early, plain-language error instead of a broken export. The newest-first order is a deliberate default: people downloading reviews usually want to know what changed recently, so the free slice should be the recent one. The column names in this post are the live headers in today's download, and the free 100-review allowance is the live product value, not a launch promotion. Every claim about what Google's own tools can do links to Google's documentation so you can check it yourself.

Using downloaded reviews responsibly

Public reviews are public, but reviewers are still people. Analyse freely, publish carefully. Quote review text anonymously, never contact reviewers who did not write to you, and never repost a competitor's praise as if it were yours. If you hold the file under the GDPR or a similar law, treat reviewer names as personal data: keep only what the analysis needs and delete the file when the project ends. If you are the owner, use the download to find patterns, then answer reviews where Google intends, on the listing itself.

For a structured method that turns a rival's file into a positioning brief, see the Google reviews competitor analysis walk-through. For a tour of the CSV export itself, see how to export Google reviews to CSV.

Download all Google reviews of a business free →