Can I Use Google Reviews on My Website?

Yes, you can display your Google reviews on your own website, and the ordinary five-review widget almost everybody uses is the safest version of it, precisely because you do not get to choose which five it shows. The legal exposure does not start when you put Google reviews on your site. It starts when you start picking them.

That distinction is missing from nearly every guide on this, which tends to stop at the technical question of how to embed the widget. The embed is the easy part. What follows is what the Google APIs will and will not give you, what the Federal Trade Commission rules that took effect in 2024 actually say about curating a review display, and where a Google review stops being the right tool for the page you are putting it on.

Can I use Google reviews on my website?

Yes. Displaying reviews of your own business, pulled through Google's official APIs and attributed to Google, is a normal and intended use. Google publishes the Places API and the Business Profile API for exactly this, and the review data comes with the reviewer name, photo and rating attached so the attribution is built in. The three routes differ in what they let you do, and the differences matter more than they first appear.

Read the third column rather than the second. The number of reviews is a feature question. Whether you chose them is a compliance question, and it is the one nobody flags.

How many Google reviews can I show on my website?

Five, if you are using the Places API, which is what sits behind most Google review widgets you can install. The Place Details response returns a maximum of five reviews for a place. There is no parameter that raises the limit, no pagination, and no sorting control, so you cannot ask for the five best or the five most recent. Developers have been asking Google to change this for over a decade and the feature request is still open.

This catches people out badly when a business with four hundred reviews installs a widget and sees five. Nothing is broken. That is the product. The only official way to get past it is the Google Business Profile API, which returns full review sets in pages of up to fifty, but it authenticates with OAuth rather than an API key and only works for locations your account actually manages. If a client asks you to put their reviews on their site, you need them to grant access to the profile, not just send you a link to it.

One naming point that causes confusion in older documentation: Google My Business was renamed Google Business Profile, so a guide talking about the GMB API and a guide talking about the Business Profile API are describing the same thing.

Is it legal to copy and paste Google reviews onto my website?

Copying the text of a review you received and putting it on your own site with the reviewer's first name and last initial is what thousands of businesses do, and it is not the part that gets anyone in trouble. Two things do deserve care.

The first is editing. Once you paste a review into your own page and wrap it in quotation marks, you are representing those as the customer's exact words. The FTC Endorsement Guides at 16 CFR 255.1(b) say an endorsement may not be presented out of context or reworded so as to distort in any way the endorser's opinion or experience, and that an advertisement need not present the message in the exact words of the endorser unless the advertisement represents that it is presenting the endorser's exact words, such as through the use of quotation marks. Trimming a review to fit a card, cutting the qualifier, or joining two sentences from different paragraphs are the edits everyone makes without thinking, and quotation marks raise the standard you are held to when you make them.

The second is that you are moving somebody else's words onto a commercial page without asking. A short attributed quote in the ordinary way is low risk and is what the platform ecosystem is built around. Rebuilding a full page out of harvested review text is a different exercise, and if you got that text by scraping Google Maps rather than through an API, you have also broken Google's terms to get it. Use the API or ask the customer.

Can I choose which Google reviews to display on my site?

Technically yes, through the Business Profile API or a widget with a picker. This is the question that carries the real risk, and it is worth being exact about why.

The FTC's Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, 16 CFR Part 465, includes a review suppression provision at 465.7. Subsection (b) makes it unlawful for a business to materially misrepresent, expressly or by implication, that the consumer reviews of its products or services represent most or all reviews, when reviews have been suppressed based on their rating or their negative sentiment.

Put that next to the five-review widget and the shape of the risk becomes clear. A widget that shows five reviews you did not select, labeled as Google reviews, is not claiming to be a representative sample of anything. A hand-picked wall of thirty five-star reviews, presented on a page headed "What our customers say", filtered by you on the basis of rating, is much closer to the thing 465.7(b) describes. The free version is safer than the paid version, and it is safer for the exact reason people upgrade away from it.

The rule is not a trap for anyone acting in good faith, and it lists the grounds on which you may lawfully withhold a review:

Two practical readings. If you are going to curate, say so, and do not frame a selected set as if it were the full picture. And keep a record of why anything was left out, because the left column is a list of reasons you should be able to state.

Can I hide or delete a bad Google review?

Not on Google. You can flag a review for policy violations and Google decides, and you can reply to it. What you cannot do is remove it because you disagree with it.

The part worth knowing is 465.7(a), which is about how businesses respond rather than what they display. It makes it unlawful to use an unfounded or groundless legal threat, a physical threat, intimidation, or a public false accusation in response to a consumer review in order to prevent it being written or to get it taken down. A lawyer's letter sent to a customer over a genuine one-star review, with no real legal basis behind it, is the textbook example. Publicly accusing a real customer of being a fake reviewer sits in the same provision.

Replying calmly and publicly to a negative review remains the correct move and is unaffected by any of this. In regulated fields the reply is where most of the risk lives, for reasons that have nothing to do with the FTC, which we cover for healthcare practices in can dentists ask patients for reviews.

Should I use Google reviews or testimonials on my website?

Both, for genuinely different jobs, and confusing them is why so many sites have a review widget doing work it is not shaped for.

A Google review is third-party validated, which is its whole strength. Nobody thinks you wrote it. It is also a star rating plus a short paragraph, it lives on Google's servers, it can be removed by Google, and you can show five of them. It is proof that you exist and that people are broadly happy.

A testimonial is something a customer gave you directly. It can be as long as it needs to be, it can answer the specific objection a visitor has on that page, it can be ninety seconds of video showing a real person's face, and it belongs to you. It is proof that a particular kind of buyer got a particular result.

The mistake is putting the five-star widget on a pricing page and expecting it to close anyone. Someone hesitating over a price is not asking whether you are legitimate, they are asking whether this works for someone like them. That is a testimonial's job, and a wall of testimonials does it better than a rating average, because the volume and the specificity are themselves the argument. Use the Google widget for credibility near the top of the page, and owned testimonials where the decision actually happens. The full comparison of what each format is good for is in testimonial versus review.

There is also a portability argument that only shows up later. Reviews you collected on Google stay on Google if you rebrand, move the business, or lose access to the profile. Testimonials you collected move with you, and the same set renders on whatever you rebuild the site in. If your reviews currently live inside a marketing platform rather than on your own site, that applies there too: agencies running client funnels hit it constantly, which is why we wrote up how HighLevel handles the two differently on GoHighLevel testimonials.

The practical setup

For most US businesses the sensible arrangement is unglamorous:

1. Put the Google widget where credibility is the question. Near the top of the home page, on a location page, in the footer. Five reviews you did not pick, clearly labeled as Google reviews.
2. Ask for Google reviews through a normal request. Just be careful how you ask. Google's own policies prohibit merchants from asking staff to solicit a set number of reviews and from requesting reviews that name a staff member, both of which are common practices businesses do not realize are against the rules. The detail is in how to get more Google reviews.
3. Collect testimonials separately, and own them. One link the customer can answer in writing or on camera, with the consent captured alongside the words. The mechanics are on collect testimonials.
4. Put the testimonials where people decide. Pricing page, booking page, the objection-shaped page. Match the testimonial to the objection.
5. Keep a record of what you left out and why. This costs you nothing while everything is fine and matters a great deal if it ever is not.

One thing that is easy to forget once the widget is installed: review content on a page changes what that page says, and pages get re-crawled. If you have gone to the trouble of adding proof to a location or service page, it is worth going back a month later to check the page is actually ranking for what you wanted it to, rather than assuming that adding social proof was neutral. Sometimes it helps, and sometimes a widget pushes the content that was ranking a long way down the page.

The short version: showing Google reviews on your site is fine, the five-review cap is a product limit and not a bug, and the moment you start hand-picking which reviews appear you have taken on a duty not to present the selection as the whole story. Everything past that is a question of putting the right kind of proof on the right page, and that is a marketing decision rather than a legal one.