Google Business Profile API: Google My Business API access, reviews and rate limits

The Google Business Profile API is free of charge and hard to get. There is no per-call price and no SKU on the Maps Platform pricing list, but you cannot call it until Google approves a written application, and Google requires a profile that has been verified and active for at least 60 days plus an official website listed on it. Reviews are the part that surprises people: they never moved to the new versioned services and still sit on the legacy v4 Google My Business API. Below is the approval process, the exact review endpoints, the documented 300 QPM quota, and an honest answer to whether you need any of it.

How access works

Google, G2, Trustpilot and direct Read at developers.google.com, August 2026 Last updated August 2026

No approval, no OAuth, no quota

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Most searches for this API end at "get my Google reviews onto my website". That does not need an application. This is the same job as a script tag, across Google, G2, Trustpilot and direct reviews.

The step everyone underestimates

How do I get Google Business Profile API access?

Enabling the APIs in Google Cloud Console is not enough. The review service stays invisible in the API library until a human at Google approves your project, and the eligibility bar is written into the prerequisites page.

Google Business Profile API access requirements, read at Google's prerequisites documentation on 30 August 2026
Requirement	What Google asks for	Where it bites
Profile age	A Business Profile that is verified and active for 60 days or more	A new location cannot be onboarded to the API on day one, whatever your launch plan says
Website	An official business website listed on the profile	Profiles running on a social page with no site of their own do not qualify
Applicant identity	An email address listed as an owner or manager on the profile	An agency developer applying from their own domain gets rejected; apply as the client
Cloud project	A Google Cloud project, and its Project Number from the dashboard	Project Number, not Project ID. Submitting the ID stalls the request
Organization account	An Organization account established through the Business Profile help center	Separate from the Cloud organization, and easy to confuse with it
The form	The Business Profile API contact form, choosing "Application for Basic API Access"	There is no self-serve toggle anywhere in the console that substitutes for it

Google does not publish how long approval takes, so the only status signal you get is the quota page. Open your project's quota view for the Google My Business API and read the queries-per-minute figure. 0 QPM means the application has not been approved. 300 QPM means it has. That single number is the whole feedback loop, and knowing it saves a week of guessing whether the request was received.

Which API do I actually enable

The seven Business Profile services, and the one that has reviews

Google's basic setup page lists seven services to enable in Cloud Console. Only one of them carries review methods, and it is the oldest one in the list.

Google Business Profile API services and what each covers, read at Google's basic setup documentation on 30 August 2026
Service	What it covers	Reviews?
Google My Business API (v4)	The legacy service. Reviews, replies and a handful of functions never migrated	Yes, this is the one
My Business Account Management API	Accounts, admins, invitations and who can manage what	No
My Business Business Information API	Locations, hours, categories, attributes, and location search	No
My Business Verifications API	Starting and completing location verification programmatically	No
My Business Notifications API	Pub/Sub notification settings, including new review events	Signals only, no review content
My Business Place Actions API	Action links such as booking, ordering and reservations	No
My Business Lodging API	Hotel-specific attributes and amenities	No

Google's own documentation notes that the Google My Business API "is only visible" to approved users. That is why so many first integrations stall in the same place: an engineer searches the API library for the review service, finds nothing, and assumes the API was retired. It was not. It is hidden behind the approval, and the newer, better-documented services sitting right next to it in the library carry no review methods at all.

What you can actually call

The Google My Business reviews endpoints

Five methods, all under mybusiness.googleapis.com/v4. Every path starts with an account you authenticate as, which is the single most important fact about this API.

Google My Business API v4 review endpoints, read at Google's review data documentation on 30 August 2026
Method	Path	What it does
GET	/accounts/{accountId}/locations/{locationId}/reviews	Every review on one location, paginated, with averageRating and totalReviewCount
GET	/accounts/{accountId}/locations/{locationId}/reviews/{reviewId}	A single review by ID, useful when a notification fires
POST	/accounts/{accountId}/locations:batchGetReviews	Many locations in one call. Takes locationNames, pageSize, pageToken, orderBy and ignoreRatingOnlyReviews
PUT	/accounts/{accountId}/locations/{locationId}/reviews/{reviewId}/reply	Posts or updates the owner response. Body is a single comment string
DELETE	/accounts/{accountId}/locations/{locationId}/reviews/{reviewId}/reply	Removes an owner response you previously posted

There is no five review cap here

This is the one genuine advantage over the Places API. reviews.list is paginated and returns the full history for a location you own, sorted by rating or update time, so a 4,000 review profile comes back 4,000 reviews at a time you control. The Places API caps every response at five reviews no matter what you pay.

Replies need OAuth, not an API key

Writing a response is a user action, so the reply endpoint needs OAuth 2.0 credentials for an account with owner or manager rights. On Google Workspace there is a second gate: an administrator has to have enabled Google Search or Google Maps as a service for the domain, or the token comes back without the scope even though consent succeeded.

Rate limits

What are the Google Business Profile API rate limits?

Approved projects get 300 queries per minute per service. The daily caps and the edit limit are where multi-location integrations actually break.

Google Business Profile API usage limits, read at Google's limits documentation on 30 August 2026
Scope	Documented limit	Notes
Default, every service	300 QPM	Account Management, Performance, Verifications, Lodging, Place Actions and Notifications all share this figure
Business Information, default	300 QPM	The general read limit
Create Location, SearchGoogleLocation	300 QPD	Per day, not per minute. Bulk onboarding of a franchise takes weeks by design
Update Location	10,000 QPD	Generous for reads, tight once you sync hours nightly across thousands of locations
Edits per profile	10 per minute per profile	Google states this one cannot be increased

Asking for more quota is not a formality. Google's guidance says increases are evaluated against real usage and are rejected if your application does not consistently reach the current limit, or if average usage sits below 50 percent of the quota you already hold. The request form wants a company name, a contact email and the project number, and Google specifically warns that your website domain has to match your email domain. Before you ask, the documentation's own advice is worth taking: spread requests evenly through the day rather than firing a nightly batch, and retry 429s with exponential backoff plus jitter.

The pricing question

Is the Google Business Profile API free?

Yes, and that makes it the cheapest official route to Google review data by a wide margin. The catch is that it only works on profiles you own.

Google publishes no per-call price for the Business Profile APIs. They do not appear on the Maps Platform pricing list at all, because they are not a Maps Platform product. Access is rationed by the approval and the quota instead of by billing, so there is no paid tier and no way to buy your way past the 60 day eligibility rule. The moment you need reviews for a business you do not manage, you cross over to the Places API and the meter starts.

Google review data access routes compared on price, review volume and ownership, read at Google's pricing documentation on 30 August 2026
Route	Price	Reviews returned	Works on	Setup
Business Profile API (v4)	No published charge	All of them	Profiles you own and manage	Manual approval, OAuth, token refresh
Places API, Place Details	$25.00 per 1,000 requests, first 1,000 a month free	Maximum of 5, chosen by relevance	Any business on Maps	API key, billing account, same day
A review widget	From $24 a month, flat	Whatever you choose to display	Profiles you own, plus other sources	A script tag

The $25 figure is the one that catches teams out, because reviews sit in the Place Details Enterprise plus Atmosphere SKU, the most expensive Places tier. Ask for the reviews field and the whole request bills at that rate, even if the rest of the fields you asked for are free. Place Details Essentials is $5.00 per 1,000 and Place Details Pro is $17.00, but neither includes reviews. Our Google Reviews API page works through what the Places route costs in practice.

An honest read

Do you actually need Business Profile API access?

It is the right tool for a narrow set of jobs and overkill for the job most people are trying to do.

Apply for it if

You manage dozens or hundreds of locations and need hours, categories and attributes to stay in sync with an internal system of record.
You are building software that other businesses will connect their own profiles to, so the OAuth flow is the product rather than a chore.
You need every review in a warehouse for analysis, not just the latest handful, and you need the reply history alongside it.
You want new-review notifications through Pub/Sub so a response workflow fires within minutes instead of on a nightly poll.

Skip it if

You want your Google reviews on your homepage. That is a rendering problem, and an API is an expensive way to solve it.
You run one location or a handful. The manual reply flow in the Business Profile dashboard is faster than any integration you would build.
You need reviews for competitors or prospects. This API cannot do it at any price, because every path is scoped to an account you authenticate as.
You have nobody to own token refresh. OAuth credentials expire, and a silent expiry means a review wall that quietly stops updating.

The pattern we see most often is a team that applies for API access, waits, gets approved, builds a sync job, and then discovers the actual request was from marketing and read "put our reviews on the site". If that is the brief, a widget finishes the work the same afternoon. If you also want more reviews to display, that is a review generation problem rather than an API one, and the fastest lever is usually a direct Google review link in your follow-up messages.

Where ReviewJet fits

Reviews on your pages without an application

We are not a replacement for the Business Profile API if you manage locations at scale. We are a replacement for the reason most teams go looking for it.

Nothing to apply for

No 60 day eligibility rule, no contact form, no waiting on a quota page to flip from 0 to 300.

More than Google

Google, G2, Trustpilot and reviews you collect directly, in one widget rather than three integrations.

Collection, not just display

Email and SMS review requests built to fire on a trigger you choose, so the number of reviews grows.

Rich snippet schema

Review markup on the pages that display them, which is the part a hand-rolled API integration usually forgets.

Flat pricing

From $24 a month billed yearly. No per-call meter and no SKU tier to reason about.

No token to babysit

A script tag does not expire at 3am and does not need an on-call engineer when it does.

Questions people search

Google Business Profile API FAQ

It is a family of seven Google APIs that read and write the data behind a Google Business Profile you own: locations, hours, attributes, verifications, notifications and reviews. It is the successor branding for what developers still call the Google My Business API. It only ever touches profiles your Google account manages, so it is not a way to pull reviews for a business you do not own.

Yes, in the sense that Google publishes no per-call price for it and it does not appear on the Maps Platform pricing list. What it costs you is time and eligibility. Access is rationed by a manual approval and a quota rather than by billing, so there is no way to pay to skip the queue.

Create a Google Cloud project, note its Project Number, then submit the Business Profile API contact form and pick "Application for Basic API Access". Google requires that you manage a profile that has been verified and active for 60 days or more, that the profile lists an official business website, and that you apply from an email listed as an owner or manager on that profile.

Google does not publish a timeline anywhere in the documentation, which is the honest answer and also the frustrating one. The reliable way to check your status is the quota page in Google Cloud Console: 0 QPM means the application has not been approved yet, and 300 QPM means it has. Nothing else in the console changes.

Call accounts.locations.reviews.list against the location and page through the results with pageToken. Unlike the Places API there is no five review ceiling; the endpoint returns every review on a profile you own, along with averageRating and totalReviewCount. For several locations at once, post to accounts.locations:batchGetReviews with an array of locationNames.

Yes. A PUT to accounts/{accountId}/locations/{locationId}/reviews/{reviewId}/reply with a comment body posts or updates the owner response, and a DELETE on the same path removes it. Replies need OAuth 2.0 user credentials rather than an API key, and on Google Workspace an administrator has to have enabled Google Search or Google Maps as a service. Worth reading alongside our guide to how to respond to Google reviews, because the API posts whatever you send it.

The default for an approved project is 300 queries per minute per API. The Business Information API adds 300 queries per day for Create Location and SearchGoogleLocation and 10,000 per day for Update Location. Edits are capped at 10 per minute per profile and Google states that limit cannot be increased.

You submit a quota request form with your company name, contact email and project number, and Google warns that the email domain must match your website domain. Requests are rejected if your application does not consistently reach the current limit, or if average usage sits below 50 percent of the quota you already have.

They are the same product under two names, and both names are still live in the tooling. Google rebranded the suite to Business Profile APIs and split most functions into new versioned services, but the service you enable for reviews is still literally called the Google My Business API and its endpoints still sit under mybusiness.googleapis.com/v4.

The Google My Business API, the v4 service. The newer split services cover accounts, business information, verifications, notifications, place actions and lodging, but none of them carry review methods. This trips up most first integrations, because the v4 service is only visible in the API library once your access request has been approved.

Not through this API. Every path starts with accounts/{accountId}, so you can only reach locations your authenticated Google account manages. For a business you do not own, the Places API is the only official route and it returns a maximum of five reviews under the Place Details Enterprise plus Atmosphere SKU at $25 per 1,000 requests.

Almost certainly not. The approval process, the OAuth flow and the token refresh exist so that software can manage profiles at scale. If the goal is a review section on your marketing site, a Google reviews widget renders the same reviews from a script tag with no application, no quota and no engineer on call when a token expires.

Yes, once you are approved. The usual shape is a scheduled job that pages through reviews.list, flattens the JSON and appends rows. There is no native Sheets, Power BI or BigQuery connector from Google for this, so the transport layer is yours to build. Our walkthrough on exporting reviews to Google Sheets covers the options if you do not want to write one.

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