How to track Google reviews across every branch

To track Google reviews across every branch, pull each site's new reviews into one sheet every week, tag them against a fixed list of themes, and compare each branch with the others rather than with your brand average. Google's own tools and a spreadsheet will carry this to around ten sites. Beyond that, reading and tagging becomes a job in itself.

This guide is for marketing and operations leads at café, bakery and restaurant groups, whether the sites are company-owned or franchised.

Why track reviews branch by branch?

Customers judge the branch in front of them, not your brand as a whole, so a healthy brand average can hide the sites that are costing you visits. When someone searches for a café nearby, Google shows them that one site's rating and reviews.

The Competition and Markets Authority estimates that as much as £23 billion of UK consumer spending is potentially influenced by online reviews each year (CMA, January 2025). In BrightLocal's 2026 survey of 1,002 US adults, 97% said they read reviews for local businesses and 74% looked for reviews from the last three months (BrightLocal, 2026). The same survey found 68% would only use a business rated four stars or more. It is a US sample, so read it as a guide to behaviour rather than a UK measure.

Two things follow for a multi-site brand:

• Averages hide the spread. As an illustration, a group averaging 4.4 stars across 12 sites could have two sites at 3.9 and still look fine on a head-office report.
• Recent reviews matter more than lifetime ratings. A branch can hold a 4.5 lifetime rating while its last three months, the reviews people actually read, tell a different story.

What does Google Business Profile give you for multiple locations?

Google lets you manage many locations from one account and reply to each site's reviews. It doesn't compare branches for you or tell you what the reviews are about.

What it does:

• Business groups. You can put locations into groups in Business Profile Manager and share access with colleagues or franchisees (Google help).
• Bulk location management. Brands with ten or more locations can add, verify and edit them in bulk, including by spreadsheet upload (Google help). This covers profile details such as addresses and opening hours, not reviews.
• Reviews through the API. The Business Profile API returns each review's star rating, text, date and any reply, one location at a time, and lets you post replies (Google for Developers). A developer can use it to fill your weekly sheet automatically.

What it doesn't give you as standard:

• a side-by-side view of how each branch's rating is moving over time
• reviews sorted by theme, such as wait times, staff or food quality
• reply rate and reply time for each branch

Google is also not the only place your customers write. BrightLocal's 2026 survey found Google's share as a review source fell from 83% to 71% in a year, and people used six review sites on average (BrightLocal, 2026). For food and drink brands, add Tripadvisor and the delivery apps if they matter to your sales.

How do you track reviews across branches with a spreadsheet?

Use one sheet with one row per review, a fixed list of themes and a weekly routine. Six steps cover it.

1. List every branch. Give each site one row with its Google profile link, a short code (MAN-01, LDS-02) and the person who owns replies there.
2. Pick a weekly pull day. Each week, add every new review since the last pull: the date, branch code, star rating, review text and whether it has a reply. If you have a developer, the API can fill this in for you.
3. Tag each review with one main theme. Use a fixed list of six to eight themes, such as wait time, staff, food quality, cleanliness, value, order accuracy and delivery. Keep the list fixed so weeks compare, and have one person tag if you can.
4. Reply, and log the date you did. In BrightLocal's 2026 US survey, 32% of consumers expected a reply by the next day and 81% within a week. Half were put off by templated replies, so write each one for the review in front of you (BrightLocal, 2026).
5. Roll up by branch each week. A pivot table by branch code gives you the measures in the next section.
6. Choose one or two branches a month to act on. Pick by the size of the gap and the theme behind it, make one change, then compare that theme's share of reviews for four weeks before and after. Small numbers swing, so treat a month as a signal, not proof.

Here are the columns to start with, with one example row:

date,branch,stars,theme,review_text,replied,reply_date
2026-10-06,MAN-01,2,wait time,"Twenty minutes for two flat whites.",yes,2026-10-07

What should you track for each branch?

Track the same six measures for every branch over a rolling 90 days, then rank branches against each other. Ninety days matches the window most review readers look at: 74% in BrightLocal's 2026 US survey sought reviews from the last three months.

As a working rule, treat a branch with fewer than 20 reviews in 90 days as directional only. One bad week can move its average a long way.

Replying is worth measuring because it can move the rating itself. Researchers Davide Proserpio and Georgios Zervas found that hotels on Tripadvisor received 12% more reviews after they started replying, and their ratings rose by 0.12 stars on average (WARC, 2018; Marketing Science, 2017). The study covered hotels, not restaurants, so read it as a guide rather than a promise.

When does the spreadsheet method stop working?

The spreadsheet method usually stops working somewhere past ten sites, because reading and tagging grows with every branch you add. The arithmetic is simple. At 15 new reviews per branch per week and 30 seconds to read and tag each one, ten sites take about 75 minutes a week. Twenty sites take 2.5 hours, before anyone writes a reply.

Three other things tend to go wrong as you grow:

• Tagging drifts. Two people will tag the same review differently, and month-on-month comparisons stop meaning much.
• Google isn't the whole picture. Tripadvisor, delivery apps, Instagram and TikTok comments sit outside the sheet.
• Causes take longer to find. Spotting that one site's wait-time complaints rose after a staffing change means reading across months, not weeks.

This is the work Akili was built to take on. It reads reviews and social comments for every branch, sorts them by theme, scores each site on the same measures and ranks what to fix first. It's well suited to UK café, bakery and restaurant groups. If you'd like to see it on your own branches, book a demo.

Frequently asked questions

Can you see all your locations' Google reviews in one place?

You can manage every location from one Google account using Business Profile Manager, and reply to each site's reviews there. To compare branches over time, you'll need to bring the reviews into a spreadsheet or use a review tool.

How often should a multi-site brand check its Google reviews?

Check for new reviews daily so replies go out quickly, and look at the branch-by-branch picture weekly. In BrightLocal's 2026 US survey, 32% of consumers expected a reply by the next day.

Should head office or the branch reply to reviews?

Either can work, as long as one named person owns replies for each site and everyone follows the same guidelines. One workable split is branch managers replying to routine reviews, with serious complaints passed to head office. Our guide to replying to negative reviews across a franchise sets out who should reply to what.

How many reviews does a branch need before its rating means anything?

There's no fixed number. As a working rule, treat fewer than 20 reviews in 90 days as directional, because one bad week can move the average a long way.

Can you export Google reviews to a spreadsheet?

Yes, through the Google Business Profile API, which returns each review's rating, text, date and reply for each location. Without a developer, the practical route is to copy new reviews into your sheet during a weekly check.

Sources

• CMA secures important changes from Google to tackle fake reviews, Competition and Markets Authority, January 2025
• Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, BrightLocal, 1,002 US adults
• Brands get better ratings by replying to reviews, WARC, February 2018, reporting Proserpio and Zervas
• Online Reputation Management: Estimating the Impact of Management Responses on Consumer Reviews, Proserpio and Zervas, Marketing Science, 2017
• Manage agency business groups and Manage multiple locations, Google Business Profile Help
• Google Business Profile API reference, Google for Developers

All insights