A plain-English explanation of how WeWidget gets your Google review data — because if a tool is going to display your reviews, you deserve to know how it obtained them.
1. Search for your business.For the free rating badge and quick setup, you type your business name and we look it up through Google’s official Places API — the same service that powers countless legitimate maps and search features across the web. Google returns your public rating, review count, and a selection of recent reviews, and we display exactly what Google provides.
2. Connect your Google Business Profile.If you want your full review history, you connect your own Google account through Google’s standard OAuth screen. You see precisely one permission level, and it is read-only: we fetch your reviews and rating, nothing more. We never see your Google password, and you can revoke the access at any time from your Google account settings or your WeWidget dashboard.
Your reviews sync from Google once a day, and you can trigger a manual sync from your dashboard whenever you like. Between syncs, we serve your widget from a cached copy in our database — that’s what makes it load in a blink on your visitors’ screens instead of waiting on a round trip to Google for every page view. The cache holds only your business’s publicly visible reviews, handled under the Google user data terms in our Privacy Policy. When you disconnect your Google account, the stored access token is deleted immediately; cached review data is removed when your account is deleted.
Some widget tools collect reviews a different way: by scraping Google’s pages — fetching them server-side and extracting the review content, without the business ever granting access. We’re not naming names, and we’d rather not guess at any individual company’s methods. But it’s worth knowing the trade-offs, because they affect you. Scraping is against Google’s terms of service. It’s brittle — when Google changes its page layout, scraped widgets can break or silently go stale. And the business being displayed never actually authorised the collection.
We chose the official APIs even though it means we can only show the data Google chooses to provide. That has a real cost, and we’d rather own it than hide it: for example, photos attached to reviews aren’t available through the channels we use, so our widgets don’t show them. If review photos matter more to you than how the data was obtained, we may honestly not be the right tool. We think most businesses, given the choice, prefer their reviews to arrive the way Google intends.
This page covers how review data reaches WeWidget. For what the widget does — and doesn’t do — with your website visitors’ data, see our plain-English GDPR explanation: no cookies, no tracking, no personal data stored about them.
One more thing worth knowing: your WeWidget account itself can be protected with optional two-factor authentication, switched on any time from your dashboard settings.
Email hello@wewidget.app — a real person will answer, and if there’s something about our data handling this page doesn’t cover, we’ll add it.