Prisma Reviews / Guides / Review management with an API
Review management with an API: what to build yourself and what to plug in
Review management is the work of watching what customers say about a business on review platforms, answering them, sending problems to the right person and learning from the patterns. Dashboards like Birdeye, Podium or Yext sell it as a finished product. If you build software for businesses, you may want it inside your own product instead. This guide goes through each part of review management and says, honestly, which parts an API gives you and which you build or plug in yourself.
Multi-platform review monitoring
The foundation is knowing about every review, on every platform the business cares about, soon after it’s written. That’s harder than it sounds. Each platform has its own API, its own access process and its own data format, and many have no owner API at all. The state of review platform APIs report lists which ones do.
A unified reviews API solves this part. Prisma reads reviews from 84 platforms into one JSON format, and a webhook fires for each new review. Monitoring then becomes one integration instead of one per platform.
Smart review routing
Not every review needs the same person. A 1-star review about a late delivery should reach operations today. A 5-star review can wait for the weekly reply round. A review that names an employee might go to that location’s manager.
Routing is logic you write on top of the webhook: read the rating, the platform and the location, then decide where it goes. The guides show common routes:
- Slack alerts, Microsoft Teams and Discord for the team that answers.
- Zendesk and Intercom tickets for reviews under a set rating, so support owns them.
CRM integrations
A review is customer feedback with a name attached. Linking it to the customer record helps sales and success teams see the whole relationship. The HubSpot guide creates a note or task for each new review, and the Airtable and Notion guides keep a searchable table. Matching a review to a specific customer is rarely exact, because reviewers use first names or nicknames, so treat the match as a suggestion.
Review data reporting and insights
Owners want a few numbers: average rating, how many reviews, how many got an answer and how fast. Prisma’s review analytics API returns those per location or platform, with a monthly series, so a report doesn’t need its own database. For anything beyond that, such as comparing locations or tracking a rating after a change, store the reviews yourself and query them. The best practices guide explains how to keep that copy accurate.
Sentiment analysis and topics
Sentiment analysis labels each review as positive, negative or mixed, and topic extraction finds what people talk about: price, staff, waiting time. This is useful at scale and easy to get wrong on short or sarcastic texts.
Prisma doesn’t do this, on purpose: it returns the review exactly as written. You run your own model or service on the text, so you choose the model, see its mistakes and keep control of the data. Ratings already give a rough signal for free.
Replies, and AI-generated responses
Answering reviews, good and bad, shows future customers that someone is listening. The hard part is doing it consistently across platforms with different rules. Google Play allows 350 characters, eBay 80, and Yelp, Tripadvisor and Booking.com have no reply API for third parties at all.
With Prisma, POST /v1/reviews/{id}/reply publishes a reply on the platforms that allow it. On the others, each review carries a link to answer it on the platform. AI can help draft answers, for example through the MCP server in Claude or ChatGPT, but a person should approve each one. Prisma never writes replies itself and never publishes without your text. The AI agents guide and Slack approval guide show approval flows.
Review solicitation
Asking customers for reviews is the strongest lever for volume and recency. It’s also the most regulated part. Google forbids incentives and “review gating”, which means only asking happy customers. The FTC in the US and consumer laws in the EU treat fake or bought reviews as deceptive.
Solicitation lives in your own product: an email or text after a purchase, with a direct link to the review form. Prisma doesn’t send requests. It reads the reviews that come back, so you can measure whether a campaign worked.
Verified first-party reviews
Some platforms collect reviews only from real buyers: Judge.me, Yotpo, Trusted Shops and Feefo mark reviews as verified purchases. Those reviews carry more weight with shoppers. If your customers sell online, connecting those platforms through the API gives you verified reviews next to public ones, in the same format. See reviews API for online stores.
Review removal requests
No API can delete a genuine review, and no honest vendor promises to. Platforms remove reviews that break their own policies, such as spam, conflicts of interest or hate speech, through their own flagging process. The useful thing an integration can do is make the platform link one click away, which every Prisma review includes, and keep a record of what was flagged and when.
White-label review management
Agencies often sell review management under their own brand. The data layer can come from an API while the dashboard, the reports and the alerts carry the agency’s name. The agencies page covers how to keep clients apart and what clients still see when they connect.
Competitive analysis
Comparing your reviews with a competitor’s is a common request. It needs public data about businesses you don’t own, which is what scraping services sell. Prisma deliberately doesn’t: it only reads businesses and apps that their owner connected. If you need competitor data, see how public-data feeds compare and check each platform’s terms first.
Reviews and local SEO
Google states that high-quality, positive reviews and replies from the business can improve its visibility in local results. The parts a business controls are volume, recency and answering consistently. A review integration helps with the last two: nothing waits unanswered because nobody saw it. The Google review management page goes deeper on Google Business Profile.
Summary
| Part of review management | Comes from the API | You build or plug in |
|---|---|---|
| Monitoring on many platforms | Yes: one format, one webhook | Choosing the platforms |
| Routing and alerts | Webhook with rating and location | The rules and the channels |
| CRM sync | Review data | Matching reviews to customers |
| Reporting | Rating, count, reply rate and time | Custom comparisons |
| Sentiment and topics | Review text | The model |
| Replies | Publishing where allowed, link elsewhere | The text and the approval |
| Solicitation | Measuring the result | Sending the requests |
| Removal | Link to the platform | Flagging on the platform |
| Competitor data | No | A public-data provider |
FAQ
What is review management?
It is the work of watching what customers say about a business on review platforms, answering them, sending problems to the right person and learning from the patterns. It matters for trust, for conversion and for local search.
Can an API remove bad reviews?
No. Platforms only remove reviews that break their own policies, through their own flagging or reporting process. No API, and no honest vendor, can delete a genuine negative review.
Should I use AI to reply to reviews?
AI can draft replies, but a person should approve each one before it is published. Generic or wrong answers in public do more harm than a slow answer. Prisma never writes replies itself; it publishes the text you send.
Do reviews help local SEO?
Google says that high-quality, positive reviews and replies from the business can improve its visibility in local results. Volume, recency and answering consistently are the parts a business controls.
Build review management into your product
One API for reviews on 84 platforms, a webhook for each new one and replies by API where the platform allows it.
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