Scraping Google Maps reviews for competitor research
By Doug Nielsen, Product Manager · Updated · first published
To research competitors through reviews, pick rivals by a defensible rule, pull their reviews into a spreadsheet and tally the complaint themes. Reviews are free customer research: unprompted accounts of what went wrong and what customers would pay for. Exporting Google reviews to Excel or CSV covers getting them out.
Our Google Maps reviews scraper exports each review with the owner's response, which shows how a competitor handles complaints.
Key takeaways
- Choose competitors by a rule you can defend, not by feel.
- Compare ratings only within one category and metro.
- Lead with a fix for the category's most common complaint.
On this page6
What review data is good for
- Complaints a whole category shares: a positioning opportunity.
- The words customers actually use, for your own copy.
- One competitor over time: a run of one-star reviews naming staff usually means someone left.
Getting the reviews out
Pick your comparison set deliberately
From a scraped list of the category in your area: the top ten by review count, everyone above 4.5, or the three beating you in the map pack.Run the review scraper on those listings
Hubertino's Google Maps review scraper takes you from “all dentists in this metro” to “every review of these eight practices” in the same tool.Read the extremes first
One- and two-star reviews show where the category breaks; five-star reviews name the staff member or detail worth copying.Then read the middle
Three-star reviews are the smallest bucket and the most honest.
Every review in one sheet
- 100 free credits
- No card required
How to read reviews without fooling yourself
Volume tracks age and how hard a business asks for reviews, not quality: a 4.9 with 30 reviews and a 4.5 with 900 aren't comparable. Ratings cluster by category too; a 4.2 is mediocre for a dentist, fine for airport parking.
Watch out
Reviewers self-select
A concrete use: the complaint-to-offer move
Tally complaint themes across a category: “never called back”, “quoted one price, charged another”. The top one is your marketing promise and, if you sell its fix to the trade, your cold-email opener.
Common questions
Can I get the reviewer's contact details?
How far back do reviews go?
Should I track this on a schedule?
Written by
Doug Nielsen, Product Manager
Doug works on Hubertino; the guides on this site are published under his name. Last updated .