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Watch a business's Google rating every week

One call a place gives its rating, how many ratings it has, and how many of each star. Run it once a week, compare with the week before, and you see new reviews and a slipping score before anyone tells you.

ScrapeField

A rating moves slowly, and then all at once. This guide checks a list of businesses once a week, yours or the ones you compete with, and says what changed: how many new ratings each one got, and whether its score went up or down.

One place

GET /v1/google-maps/place takes a place_id and returns the whole listing. Three fields matter here: rating, the average; user_ratings_total, how many ratings it is the average of; and rating_distribution, how many of each star, as the listing’s bar chart shows them. A place costs 3 credits.

This week

In TypeScript, for a list of places:

const places = ['ChIJN1t_tDeuEmsRUsoyG83frY4']; // the place_ids to watch, from a search or a Maps URL
const headers = { Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.SCRAPEFIELD_KEY}` };

const thisWeek = [];
for (const placeId of places) {
  const res = await fetch(`https://api.scrapefield.com/v1/google-maps/place?place_id=${placeId}`, { headers });
  const body = await res.json();
  if (!res.ok) { console.error(placeId, body.error.code); continue; } // a failed call is not charged
  const { name, rating, user_ratings_total, rating_distribution } = body.data;
  thisWeek.push({ placeId, name, rating, user_ratings_total, rating_distribution });
}

Save thisWeek wherever you keep things, a file or a table. Next week it is lastWeek.

What changed

for (const now of thisWeek) {
  const before = lastWeek.find((p) => p.placeId === now.placeId);
  if (!before) continue;
  const newRatings = (now.user_ratings_total ?? 0) - (before.user_ratings_total ?? 0);
  const newOneStar = (now.rating_distribution?.['1'] ?? 0) - (before.rating_distribution?.['1'] ?? 0);
  const moved = (now.rating ?? 0) - (before.rating ?? 0);
  if (newRatings || moved) {
    console.log(`${now.name}: ${newRatings} new ratings, ${newOneStar} of them one star, rating ${before.rating} → ${now.rating}`);
  }
}

The star counts are the useful part. A rating of 4.6 can hide a week with ten one-star reviews, because the average moves slowly once a place has hundreds. The difference in the one-star count does not.

Running it every week

Any scheduler will do: cron, a scheduled GitHub Action, or a scheduled step in n8n or Make. A place costs 3 credits a week, so 100 places cost 300 credits a week, about $12.17 a year on the smallest pack. A place is cached for a day at most, so a weekly reading is never more than a day old.

To read what the new reviews say, fetch the place’s newest reviews when its count goes up: sorted by newest, they come first. For hundreds of places, run several calls side by side, up to your limit of calls at once.

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