How to analyze google reviews
Google reviews are the comments people leave on a Google Business Profile. They show up in Google Search and on Google Maps, and they influence whether a local business appears in the map pack. If you run a shop, clinic, restaurant, or service area business, these reviews are often the first public record of what a visit actually felt like.
Google does not give the public a one-click CSV of every Google review. That is the honest starting point. You still have practical ways to build a file you can analyze.
If you own the listing, open Google Business Profile and go to the Reviews tab. You can read every review and reply from there. For analysis, copy the star rating, the full review text, the date, and whether you already replied into a spreadsheet. This is slow for a busy listing, but it is allowed, and it is your own business data. Do not paste other people's reviews onto a promotional site as if you wrote them.
If the same reviews sit on the Google Maps place page, use our Google Maps Reviews Exporter, a Chrome extension we built for Maps listings. It is not a Google export button, and we do not have a separate extension for Google Search. The Maps extension reads the reviews already shown on the place page and saves CSV or Excel on your computer. Open the exporter page to get it, export the listing, then upload the file here.
If you already keep a monthly sheet for clients or locations, you can upload that too. The analyzer only needs a rating column and a review text column. Extra fields help, but they are optional.
Include these columns when you can: rating (required), review text (required), date, reviewer name, and owner reply. Date unlocks rating trends. Owner reply shows which complaints already have a public response. If you operate more than one location, add a location column so you are not mixing downtown and suburban feedback into one unexplained average.
What to look for in Google reviews is about the visit, not a product SKU. Watch wait time, staff tone, parking, cleanliness, "closed when Google said open," wrong hours, and phones that ring out. Restaurants should also watch ticket time and food temperature. Clinics should watch booking and front-desk friction. Home services should watch arrival windows and whether the crew cleaned up.
Do not chase a perfect average. A stable 4.4 with a new cluster of 1-star reviews about a policy change is more urgent than a slightly lower but calm rating. Sort low-star reviews first, group the repeated phrases, and pick one operational fix you can actually make this month. Then run next month's file and see if that complaint theme shrank.
This page runs the same analyzer as our generic tool. Processing stays in your browser. No account is required.
Columns to include
- Rating / stars (required)
- Review text (required)
- Date
- Reviewer name
- Owner reply
- Location name, if you have more than one listing