How to Get More than 5 Reviews from the Google Places API
Naman Nepal 
If you have ever tried to pull your Google reviews programmatically, you have hit the wall: the Google Places API returns at most five reviews per place. Not five per page, five total. No pagination parameter, no page token, no way to ask for more. This article explains the limitation and walks through every legitimate route to getting your full review history.
The Limitation, Precisely
Both the legacy Place Details endpoint and the newer Places API (New) return a reviews array capped at five entries. You can influence which five with the reviews_sort parameter (most_relevant, the default, or newest), but never the count. This is a deliberate product decision by Google, not a quota you can raise with billing. No API key tier, request trick, or field mask changes it.
That means a business with 300 reviews can only ever surface 5 of them through Places, about 1.7 percent of its social proof.
Option 1: The Google Business Profile API (Full Access, Owners Only)
If you own or manage the business, the Google Business Profile API returns all reviews for your locations, with pagination, including the reviewer, rating, text, and your replies. This is the only Google-sanctioned way to get the complete set.
The catches:
- It only works for profiles you own or manage; you authenticate via OAuth as the profile owner.
- Access requires requesting approval from Google for the Business Profile APIs, which involves a short application and is granted for legitimate business use.
- It is an account management API, so you are working with locations and accounts rather than the simple place ID lookup of Places.
For displaying your own reviews on your own site, this is the correct primary source.
Option 2: Combine Places Data with the Full Set
A practical architecture many tools use:
- Pull the complete review history once via the Business Profile API (owner authorized).
- Use scheduled re-syncs to fetch new reviews as they arrive.
- Use Places API data for the summary numbers, overall rating and total review count, which Places does return accurately even though it truncates the review list.
This gives you a complete, continuously updated local copy of your reviews to render however you want, while staying inside Google’s terms.
Option 3: Widget Services That Do It for You
If you would rather not run OAuth flows, approval applications, sync jobs, and storage, this is exactly the plumbing review widget services handle. A tool like Proof Embed connects to your Google Business Profile with your authorization, syncs your full review history, keeps it fresh automatically, and serves it as an embeddable widget. You get every review, not five, with none of the API maintenance.
What About Scraping?
Scraping Google Maps for reviews technically returns more than five, and plenty of tutorials show how. Two problems: it violates Google’s Terms of Service, and it breaks constantly as Google changes markup and anti-bot measures. For a production business site, the risk of building on scraped data (legal exposure, sudden breakage, IP blocks) outweighs saving an OAuth flow. We do not recommend it.
Displaying What You Fetch
However you obtain reviews, display rules still apply:
- Show the content as written; do not edit review text or inflate ratings.
- Keep attribution: reviewer name and the Google source.
- If you filter (say, four stars and up), make sure your overall rating display remains truthful.
The Short Version
| Approach | Reviews Available | Works For | Effort |
|---|---|---|---|
| Places API | 5 | Any place | Low |
| Business Profile API | All | Your own profiles | High |
| Widget service | All | Your own profiles | Minutes |
| Scraping | All | Anyone | Against ToS |
The five-review cap is a hard product limit, not a bug you can engineer around within the Places API. Owners should use the Business Profile API directly or a widget service built on it; everyone else is limited to five by design.