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How to Add Google Reviews to Your Website

Google's own embed, the Places API, copy and paste, or a tool — with the real drawbacks of each, and the schema mistake that gets your stars removed.

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Four methods to display Google reviews on a website are covered: embedding a map directly from Google (free but includes an unwanted map and limited styling), using the Places API (gives control but costs money, returns only five reviews, and requires maintenance), copying reviews manually (zero dependencies but becomes outdated), and using a testimonial tool like Testimonial.to (aggregates reviews from multiple platforms, offers customizable widgets, free up to 20 reviews but may require a subscription). The guide also warns against adding Google reviews to structured data markup, as it can lead to removal of star ratings. Finally, it suggests which method fits different scenarios based on business type, review count, and technical resources.
Title
How to Add Google Reviews to Your Website: 4 Methods
Date
Jan 6, 2026
Description
Four ways to put Google reviews on your site: Google's embed, the Places API, copy and paste, or a tool. With the real drawbacks of each, including ours.
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Done
Current Column
Published ✨
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Writer
You have 40-odd Google reviews averaging 4.8.
They are sitting on a Maps listing that nobody visits on their way to your pricing page.
You want them on your site, and every guide you have opened so far turns out to be an ad for the tool that wrote it.
Four methods below. Google's own, two ways to build it, and the tool route. I build one of these for a living and I will still tell you when the free option beats it.

Method 1 — Google's own embed

The only method that comes straight from Google, and it costs nothing.
  1. Open Google Maps and search for your business name.
  1. Open the Menu (top left).
  1. Select Share or embed map.
  1. Choose the Embed a map tab, then Copy HTML.
  1. Paste it anywhere on your site.
Done. It works on any platform that accepts an HTML block.
Now the part I never see the other guides mention. You did not embed your reviews. You embedded a map that happens to have reviews behind it.
Three problems:
  • You get a map whether you want one or not. If you are a SaaS company with no premises, you have just put a pin on your homepage pointing at a WeWork.
  • No control over which reviews show. Google decides. Your best review might be fourth.
  • Styling is a fight. It arrives in an iframe. Matching your brand means working around Google's CSS rather than with it.
Use this if you are a local business, the map is genuinely useful to the visitor, and you want it live in five minutes.
Skip it if your location is irrelevant to the sale. For most software companies that is the whole story, and I would not bother.

Method 2 — Build it yourself with the Places API

If you have a developer, you can pull your reviews as data and render them however you like.
You will need a Google Cloud project, an API key, and your Place ID. The Places API returns your business details including reviews, and you render them in your own markup.
What you get: full control. Your fonts, your layout, your choice of which reviews appear.
What it costs you:
  • It is a paid API, billed per request against Google's SKU tiers. Google has changed the rates before, so check the current ones yourself rather than trusting any number in a blog post, this one included. Cache the response instead of calling on every page load.
  • It returns five reviews. Five. Not your most recent five, not five you choose — five that Google picks, with no pagination and no sort order. Developers have been asking for more since 2015. If you have forty reviews, thirty-five of them are not reachable this way. The Google Business Profile API is the route to the rest, and it is a heavier piece of work than this one.
  • Somebody has to maintain it. API keys get rotated, endpoints get deprecated, and this becomes a ticket in six months.
Use this if you have engineering time, a design you cannot compromise on, and five reviews is genuinely enough.
Skip it if the answer to "who maintains this" is nobody. That is the question I would ask first, and it kills this option more often than the pricing does.
Worth sitting with the arithmetic: this is the method that costs a developer, a cloud project and an ongoing bill, and it returns fewer reviews than Method 3 gets you with copy and paste.

Method 3 — Copy them out by hand

Genuinely worth considering, and I never see anyone suggest it, because it does not sell anything.
Take your six best reviews. Paste them into your page as plain text with the reviewer's name and a star rating. Screenshot the Google listing once and put it nearby so the reader can see they are real.
What you get: zero dependencies, zero load time, complete control, and it never breaks.
What it costs you: it is a snapshot. In eight months it is stale, and the review count you typed by hand is wrong.
Use this if you have fewer than ten reviews and you are not collecting more yet.
Skip it if you are actively gathering reviews. You will not keep it updated — I have never seen anyone who does.

Method 4 — A testimonial tool

This is what we build, so read the drawbacks section with that in mind.
The shape is the same across every tool in this category: connect your Google listing, the tool pulls the reviews in, you pick which ones to show, and you paste one snippet onto your site.

Doing it with Testimonial.to

Social import pulls existing praise from Google, plus X, LinkedIn, Reddit, G2, Yelp and TikTok.
For Google it opens Search your business, you type the business name, and you pick your listing out of the results — useful when there are three near-identical entries and only one is really yours. Then you choose how much to pull: Fetch reviews from the first 2 pages (max 20 reviews), or Fetch all 150 reviews (up to 200 reviews) if your plan allows it.
The part that saves the afternoon is what comes next. Rather than approving reviews one at a time, you set a Minimum stars requirement — three by default — and can tick Ignore blank-comment reviews, and the import respects both. Add to my Wall of Love is checked by default, so they land where you want them instead of somewhere you have to go and find. The button then tells you exactly what you are getting: Import 18 reviews, not Import.
Two honest notes on that. Only published reviews are shown, and the filters mean the number you import is smaller than the number you fetched — pulling 20 from a 150-review listing with a three-star floor left 18.
Embedding is a one-line snippet. There are seven widget layouts — Fixed Masonry Testimonial Grid, Animated Masonry Review Grid, Carousel Slider Testimonial, Single Video Testimonial Embed, Single Text Review Embed, Testimonial Collection Form, and Avatar Badge Review Counter — so you can put a wall on your testimonials page and a single quote next to a pricing button. If all you want is the star rating and a review count rather than the reviews themselves, a review badge is a smaller thing to embed.
The reason to use a tool rather than Method 3 is not the embedding. It is that Google reviews stop being a separate thing you manage. They sit in the same inbox as your video testimonials and your LinkedIn praise, and the same widget shows all of them.
On pricing, precisely: Google review import is not behind the paywall. The Free plan imports up to 20 reviews — the first two pages of your listing. Any paid plan raises that to 200. So if you have 18 reviews and no plans to collect more, you can do this for nothing and never hear from us again.
What it costs you:
  • It is a subscription once you go past that free ceiling. For six reviews that never change, Method 3 is better and free.
  • It is third-party JavaScript on your page. Lazy-load it and keep it below the fold if you care about Core Web Vitals.
  • You are trusting someone else's uptime. Ours is public at status.testimonial.to; whoever you pick, go and look at theirs.
Use this if you are collecting reviews across more than one platform and want them in one place.
Skip it if Google is the only place you will ever collect reviews and you have fewer than ten. You do not need us for that.
If your reviews live mostly on Yelp, we wrote a separate guide to embedding Yelp reviews — the flow is different enough to matter.

The mistake that gets your stars removed

Everyone wants the yellow stars under their listing in Google search results. So they take their Google reviews, mark them up as AggregateRating schema on their own site, and wait.
Do not do this. Google's review snippet documentation names this exact scenario:
If the entity that's being reviewed controls the reviews about itself, their pages that use LocalBusiness or any other type of Organization structured data are ineligible for star review feature. For example, a review about entity A is placed on the website of entity A, either directly in their structured data or through an embedded third-party widget (for example, Google Business reviews or Facebook reviews widget).
Two more lines from the same page: "Ratings must be sourced directly from users" and "Don't aggregate reviews or ratings from other websites."
At best the markup is ignored. At worst you get a manual action for structured data spam.
I know this cuts against what a lot of pages in this category imply. Do not take my word for it — Google's review snippet documentation is linked below, and the widget example is Google's own, not mine.
Star ratings in search come from reviews collected on your own domain, marked up correctly. That is a different job from displaying your Google reviews, and it is a different post.

Per-platform notes

The embed is one snippet, so the only question is where your platform lets you paste it.
  • WordPress — Custom HTML block, or a snippet plugin if you want it site-wide.
  • Shopify — Theme editor, Custom Liquid section. Put it on the product template, not just the homepage.
  • Squarespace — Code Block. Plain HTML works on any plan, but an iframe or JavaScript needs the Core plan or above — and both methods here are one or the other.
  • Webflow — Embed element. There is a 50,000-character limit, which a one-line snippet will never come near.
  • Wix — Add → Embed Code → Embed HTML.
  • Framer, Carrd, Bubble, Kajabi — all take an embed component.
If your platform is not listed and it accepts an HTML block, it works.

Which one to actually pick

  • Local business, map is relevant → Method 1. Five minutes, free, done.
  • Fewer than ten reviews, not collecting more → Method 3. Copy them by hand.
  • A designer with strong opinions, a developer to spend, and five reviews is enough → Method 2.
  • Collecting across more than one platform → Method 4.
  • You want stars in Google search results → none of the above. Collect reviews on your own site instead.
If I had to pick one for a software company with no shopfront, it is Method 4, and if that reads as self-serving, Method 3 costs nothing and takes an afternoon. Try that first and come back when it goes stale.

Wrapping up

That is four ways to get Google reviews onto your site, and one way to get your stars removed.
Stuck partway through any of them? Reply to this post and tell me which step — I will tell you what is going wrong.
If you want your Google reviews sitting in the same place as your video testimonials and your LinkedIn praise, start free.

Sources

  • Place Details — Google Maps Platform. What the Places API returns, and how requests are billed.
  • Code blocks — Squarespace Help Center. Which plans allow iframes and JavaScript.
  • Custom code embed — Webflow Help Center. The 50,000-character limit on Code Embed elements.
Rates, limits and interface labels change. Everything above was checked on 17 August 2026; if you are reading this much later, check the source rather than the summary.

Written by

Damon Chen
Damon Chen

Founder of Testimonial