how do i add google reviews to my site without scraping them

business · 2026-09-28 · 3 min

google does not give you an embed code for reviews. you have four honest options — screenshot, third-party widget, places api, or ask and quote — and each one has a cost that is not always money.

what google actually allows

the reviews on your google business profile belong to google and to the people who wrote them. there is no official review block. the places api returns up to five reviews per place, and its terms restrict how long you may cache them and require attribution. copying them by hand into your html is technically easy and technically against the terms, and it also means they go stale the moment someone edits a review.

the three practical routes

a screenshot. take a clean capture of two or three reviews, link it to your profile, and update it when it matters. it is free and fast, but it is a picture: unreadable to a screen reader unless you repeat the text next to it.

a widget. elfsight, trustindex and similar services connect to your profile and render the reviews, usually for a monthly fee. the trade-offs are real: an external script on every page, a cookie or two, a request to a third party, and a dependency that breaks when the service changes its pricing.

the places api. you get the data, you build the display, you control the design. it needs a google cloud project, a billing account and someone to write the code. for a small site it is usually the most expensive option per review.

the route i would pick

ask for reviews, then quote the good ones as text with a name and a link to the profile. it is the fastest to load, the easiest to read on a phone, and the only version you fully control. a sentence someone actually wrote, attributed, beats a carousel of stars.

and put the effort where it compounds: getting the review in the first place. read how to get more google reviews before shopping for a widget. three old reviews on a carousel do less than a message to the last ten customers.

faq

can i just screenshot google reviews?

you can, and many sites do. keep it readable, add the text version for accessibility, link to the profile, and refresh it when the reviews change.

will a review widget slow down my site?

it adds an external script and usually a request to a third-party domain. that is typically tens to hundreds of kilobytes and a new privacy consideration. lazy-load it below the fold if you use one.

do i need permission to show a customer's review?

the review is public, but the name and photo are personal data. ask before you use a quote with a full name or a face, and keep a record of the yes.