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I have a React Application which is going to leverage Google My Business API to get review data of a business.

I was expecting to use the API-KEY via REST approach however Authorization Scope mentions that OAuth 2.0 is required to use this API.

After I read more about OAuth's purpose, it seemed like it is more for application's which require access to a user's data and therefore would required a consent screen verified by google.

For my use-case however, all I need is access to all google reviews for a business and nothing related to the visiting users.

Can someone recommend an approach for this? (I don't want a pop-up/consent request when a user visits as I don't need user data.)

Jonathan Scialpi
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1 Answers1

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After much research, it seems that if you want to retrieve ALL REVIEWS for your business you will have to use Google's My Business API. This API requires you to use OAUTH2 for authentication which means (although you will not be querying a visiting user's data) visiting users will be required to provide consent pop up screen.

This leaves you with the places API as the next best option:

REST GET endpoint maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/details/json?placeid={your place ID}&fields=review&key={YOUR API KEY}

Although this only returns google's top 5 "most helpful" reviews, its pretty much the only way to get reviews without a consent screen unless you want to scrape data which is not ideal for many reasons...

Jonathan Scialpi
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    We ended up changing our requirement to show the latest 5 reviews and then added a link to google maps location to "View all" the reviews. – Riyaz Ahmed Feb 01 '23 at 07:45