Prisma Reviews / Guides / What is a review aggregator?
What is a review aggregator?
A review aggregator is a site or tool that collects reviews and ratings from many sources and shows them in one place, usually with a combined score. Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic do it for films and games. For a business, a review aggregator pulls its own reviews from Google, Yelp, Trustpilot, the app stores and the rest into one feed, so the team reads and answers them without opening ten tabs. This guide is part of our guide to Google review management tools: here we explain the types, how aggregators get their data, and what to check before you pick or build one.
What are the three types of review aggregator?
The word covers three different products, and most confusion comes from mixing them up.
| Type | Examples | Whose reviews | Who uses it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Critic and audience aggregators | Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, OpenCritic, Goodreads | Critics’ and users’ reviews of films, games, books | Consumers deciding what to watch, play or read |
| Review platforms that pool their own reviews | Google, Yelp, Tripadvisor, Trustpilot, G2 | Reviews written on that platform | Consumers choosing a business, and the business itself |
| Business review aggregators | Birdeye, ReviewTrackers, GatherUp, Prisma | One business’s reviews from many platforms | The business, its agency or its software vendor |
The first two are public websites. The third is a back-office tool: the reviews it collects are already public on each platform, and the aggregator’s job is to bring them together for the business that received them.
How does a business review aggregator work?
Every business review aggregator does the same four jobs:
- Connect each source. The business links its Google Business Profile, its App Store app, its Trustpilot page or its Yelp listing.
- Collect. The aggregator checks each source on a schedule, or receives a push when a new review arrives.
- Normalize. Every platform names things differently (stars, rating, score; author, reviewer, user). The aggregator maps them into one format: rating, text, author, date, reply, link.
- Deliver. The reviews appear in a dashboard, an email digest, a Slack channel, a report or, with an API, inside your own product.
Most tools then add their own layer on top: review request campaigns by SMS or email, website widgets, sentiment tags and reply workflows. That layer is where suites like Birdeye and Podium differ most.
Where does an aggregator get its review data?
This is the question to ask any vendor, because it decides how complete, fast and safe the data is.
| Method | How it works | Good | Watch out |
|---|---|---|---|
| Official API | The business authorizes the tool through the platform’s own sign-in or API key | Complete, fast, and allows replies where the platform supports them | Each platform needs its own approval; some never open one to third parties |
| Platform partner program | The tool is a certified partner (for example, Google’s review partners for seller ratings) | Stable and approved | Usually only one direction: sending reviews to the platform |
| Data provider | The tool buys public review data from a provider that reads public listings | Covers platforms with no API, such as Yelp’s full review list | Read only; you pay per review read |
| Scraping | The tool reads the public pages itself | Works anywhere | Breaks often, and many platforms’ terms forbid it |
How two review APIs built on opposite methods compare, crawling public profiles against connecting as the owner: Repuso vs Prisma.
Google is a good example of the limits. The Places API returns at most 5 reviews per place. The Google Business Profile API returns every review of a location and lets the owner reply, but Google approves each developer project before it gets any quota. If you want the detail, our Google reviews API guide covers both.
What should a good review aggregator do?
Use this list when you compare tools:
- Coverage of your platforms. Count the ones you actually get reviews on, not the headline number. A dentist needs Google, Healthgrades and Yelp. An app team needs the App Store and Google Play.
- Freshness. How often each source is checked, and whether new reviews arrive by webhook or only on the next sync.
- History. How far back the first import goes, and how long reviews are kept.
- Replies. Whether you can answer from the tool, and on which platforms. On Yelp and Tripadvisor no third-party tool can post a reply through an API; you answer on the platform.
- Edits and deletions. Reviews change. A good aggregator updates the rating when a customer edits a review and marks it when the review disappears.
- Export and API. Whether you can get your data out in CSV or through an API, or only see it on screen.
- No fake reviews. An aggregator collects real reviews. It should never write reviews, and it should not filter out the bad ones before showing your score. The US Federal Trade Commission’s rule on fake reviews, in force since October 2024, bans suppressing negative reviews and buying fake ones.
Should you buy a review aggregator or build one?
Buy a dashboard if your team just needs to read and answer reviews, and nobody writes code. A suite or a lighter tool from our list of review management software will do it out of the box.
Build your own if reviews belong inside something you already have: your SaaS product, your agency’s client dashboard, your data warehouse or your CRM. Then you want an aggregation layer, not another screen. Building it from scratch means one integration per platform: OAuth apps, approvals, rate limits, pagination, edits and deletions, all different. That is a few weeks per platform, and constant upkeep.
That middle layer is what Prisma does. Prisma is a reviews API: one key reads reviews from 84 platforms in one JSON format, and one call publishes a reply where the platform’s official API allows it (the App Store, Google Play, Judge.me and others today; Google Business Profile and Trustpilot once each platform approves Prisma’s access).
curl "https://api.prismareviews.com/v1/reviews?location_id=loc_123&since=2026-11-01T00:00:00Z" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer pk_test_YOUR_KEY"A test key returns sample reviews from every platform, so you can build the screen before you connect anything. New reviews arrive as a signed webhook (review.created, review.updated, review.deleted), and the same data is available to Claude, Cursor or VS Code through Prisma’s MCP server. Platforms without a reply API, such as Yelp and Tripadvisor, are read only, and each review carries a link to answer it on the platform.
How much does a review aggregator cost?
It depends on the type. Suites with review requests, messaging and widgets usually quote per location after a demo. Lighter monitoring tools publish plans from a few dozen dollars a month. An API like Prisma charges by connected locations: 2 locations are free, and paid plans start at €49 a month for 10, billed monthly with no contract. Platforms read through a data provider (Google Maps, Yelp, Tripadvisor and others) use paid reads, included in every paid plan. Full details are on the pricing page.
Frequently asked questions
What is a review aggregator?
A review aggregator is a site or tool that collects reviews and ratings from many sources and shows them in one place, often with a combined score. For a business, it brings its own reviews from Google, Yelp, Trustpilot and other platforms into one feed.
What is an example of a review aggregator?
Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic are the best-known public examples, for films and games. For businesses, Birdeye, ReviewTrackers and GatherUp are dashboards that aggregate a company’s reviews, and Prisma is an API that does the same inside your own software.
Is Google a review aggregator?
Not in the usual sense. Google collects reviews written on Google itself. It also shows ratings from some other sites in search results, but a business review aggregator pulls one company’s reviews from many platforms, including Google.
Is it legal to aggregate reviews?
Collecting your own business’s reviews through official APIs is allowed by each platform’s terms. Scraping other sites’ review pages often breaks their terms of service. Showing aggregated reviews on your website is fine as long as you don’t hide negative ones or present them as something they’re not.
How do review aggregators get their data?
Through each platform’s official API, through partner programs, through data providers that read public listings, or by scraping. Official APIs give the most complete and up-to-date data and are the only route that also allows replies.
Can a review aggregator reply to reviews?
Only where the platform has a reply API open to third parties, such as Google Business Profile, the App Store, Google Play and Trustpilot. On Yelp and Tripadvisor, replies are made on the platform itself.
Build your own review aggregator in an afternoon
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