How to Reply to Google Business Reviews via API

How reviews surface in the API

Google reviews live on a location, not on a post, so they flow through the Profile Comments API rather than the post-level Comments API. A review is a top-level comment; your answer is a reply nested under it.

Postproxy pulls reviews from Google twice a day (06:00 and 18:00 UTC) for every connected google_business profile, and fires a profile_comment.created webhook for each new one — so you don’t poll Google or manage its OAuth scopes.

Prerequisites

• A Postproxy API key
• A connected Google Business profile (the connected Google account may manage several locations)

List reviews

curl "https://api.postproxy.dev/api/profiles/PROFILE_ID/comments" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"

Results are newest-first by posted_at. Each review carries the reviewer’s name and avatar, your replies in a replies array, and the star rating in platform_data.star_rating.

Two Google-specific shapes to handle:

• Star-only reviews — Google allows ratings with no text. body is null but platform_data.star_rating is populated, so don’t skip records on an empty body.
• Permalink — points at the location’s reviews page on Google, shared by all reviews there. Google’s API doesn’t expose per-review URLs.

Multi-location accounts

A google_business profile represents the connected Google account, which may manage multiple locations — including unrelated businesses. Without a filter, the list interleaves reviews from all of them.

Enumerate locations first, then scope by placement_id:

# List locations
curl "https://api.postproxy.dev/api/profiles/PROFILE_ID/placements" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"

# Reviews for one location
curl "https://api.postproxy.dev/api/profiles/PROFILE_ID/comments?placement_id=accounts/1234/locations/5678" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"

Reply to a review

curl -X POST "https://api.postproxy.dev/api/profiles/PROFILE_ID/comments" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "parent_id": "REVIEW_ID",
    "body": "Thanks Jane — glad the espresso landed. See you next week!"
  }'

parent_id is required — Google reviews are user-generated, so top-level comments can’t be authored through the API (the request returns 422 without it). It accepts the Postproxy hashid or Google’s native resource path (accounts/X/locations/Y/reviews/Z).

The reply is stored with status: "pending" and pushed to Google asynchronously; it flips to published once it lands, or failed / failed_waiting_for_retry with error_details if Google rejects it.

React to new reviews in real time

Subscribe to profile_comment.created on your webhook endpoint. It fires for newly synced incoming reviews and for your own replies once published. The payload includes placement_id, body, and platform_data.star_rating — enough to route on the spot: thank 5-star reviewers automatically, page a human for anything at 3 stars or below.

The event fires across all locations of the account; filter on data.object.placement_id if you only care about some. For a fully automated pipeline with an LLM drafting the responses, see How to Auto-Respond to Google Reviews with AI.

Update or remove your reply

Google supports one owner reply per review. To remove yours:

curl -X DELETE "https://api.postproxy.dev/api/profiles/PROFILE_ID/comments/REPLY_ID" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"

This deletes your reply only — businesses can’t delete the review itself; the original stays.

What the API can and can’t do

Full object fields and error shapes: Profile Comments API. Publishing local posts, events, and offers to the same profile is covered on the Google Business platform page.