Can you show your Google reviews on your website?

Are you allowed to put Google reviews on your website?

Yes. Google publishes the reviews on a Business Profile openly and offers a documented way to read them, so displaying them is a supported use rather than a grey area. What is not open-ended is how: the Places API policies attach conditions to every review you pull, and those conditions — attribution, a link back, no altered text — are the licence under which the display happens.

Is there an official Google reviews API?

The Places API, part of Google Maps Platform, is the documented route, and there is no separate free Google reviews API beside it. It is pay-as-you-go: each request is billed by SKU, and a project needs billing enabled and a key before it returns anything. Maps Agent reads a profile's public star rating and review count as scored factors in its free Visibility Score audit, and publishes no widget.

What does Google require you to show alongside a review?

Attribution, and the policies are specific about it. You must always credit the author when displaying reviews, showing the avatar, name and a link to their profile where space allows. End users must always be able to open the individual review on Google Maps. And the attribution itself may never be removed, hidden, obscured or modified — a design that crops it out breaks the terms the data came under.

Can you cache Google reviews on your own server?

Broadly, no. The Places API policies bar pre-fetching, caching and storing Places content, with the place ID as the named exception — that identifier may be kept indefinitely, and it is what a site stores so it can fetch the rest fresh. A build that copies review text into a database has made a permanent copy of content licensed for display.

Do embedded Google reviews earn stars in search results?

No, and this is the part most widget pitches leave out. Google's review snippet documentation states that when the entity being reviewed controls the reviews about itself, pages using LocalBusiness or any Organization structured data are ineligible for the star review feature. It also says not to aggregate reviews or ratings from other websites. Reviews you host about yourself are exactly that case.

What do third-party Google review widgets actually sell?

Convenience over the same API, plus a subscription. A widget vendor holds the key, pays the per-request bill, refreshes on a schedule and renders the markup — none of which is a channel the site owner lacks. The question to put to one is narrow: does its rendering keep author attribution and the link to Google Maps intact, and does it store what the policies say not to store?

How much does showing Google reviews on a website cost?

There is no licence fee, only usage. The Places API bills per request against a Google Cloud project with billing enabled, so the cost of a review display tracks how often it fetches. Because the policies bar storing the review text, trimming that bill by keeping a copy is not an option the terms leave open — which is a large part of why widget subscriptions exist at all.

What belongs on the page beside the reviews?

The link that collects the next one. Google gives every verified profile a short review link and a matching QR code from the profile itself, and a page carrying that link converts a satisfied reader into a review on the listing that ranking actually reads. A wall of embedded quotes on a website is display; the link is supply.

Common questions

Is it legal to put Google reviews on your website?

Legality here is contract, not copyright law: the reviews come under the Google Maps Platform terms and the Places API policies, and displaying them within those terms is permitted. Copying review text out of the interface by hand and republishing it without attribution is the version that breaks them.

Can you show only your five-star reviews?

Technically the API lets a developer filter what renders, and doing so turns a review display into an advertisement of a selected subset. It also runs against the aggregate rule in Google's structured data guidance, which asks for an aggregate rating whenever multiple individual reviews are shown. Selection is visible to any reader who opens the profile.

Does embedding Google reviews improve local ranking?

Nothing on a business's own website changes what Google's local results read from the profile: relevance, distance and prominence. Google states there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. Embedded reviews work on the visitor already reading the site, which is a conversion job rather than a ranking one.

Is there a free WordPress plugin for Google reviews?

Several exist, and the free ones are free of subscription rather than free of the API bill — either they ask for your own Google Cloud key, in which case Google bills you per request, or they route through the vendor's key and limit refreshes. Check which before installing, then check the attribution it renders.

What happens to an embedded review when Google removes it?

A display that reads the API live loses it at the next fetch, which is the behaviour the policies are built around. A display that stored the text keeps showing a review Google has taken down — the concrete harm behind the caching rule, and the reason a stored copy is a liability rather than a saving.