Google review operations

9:04am. One star.
Now what?

ReviewFlow is the desk your Google reviews land on. One inbox across every location, replies that reach Google before they are recorded anywhere, and statistics — not guesswork — for telling a real slide in your rating apart from an unlucky fortnight.

Everything it does, in one list

The rest of this page makes its case slowly. This part does not.

Google Business Profile sync

OAuth 2.0 with offline access, tokens encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM, account and location discovery, and a sync that matches on the Google review id and updates each review in place rather than creating a second copy.

One inbox, scoped per organisation

Every review across every location in one place. Reply, hide in-app, or open Google's own report flow. Replies you wrote inside Google are mirrored back in.

Crisis detection with a p-value

Welch's unequal-variance t-test at p < 0.05 compares the last seven days against the seven before. The banner shows the p-value it fired on, so you can check the alert instead of trusting it.

Theme tagging that understands negation

Whole-word and phrase matching over a token stream that knows where a negation starts and stops, with a polarity check on top. “Not late” is not a complaint about lateness. “Didn’t collect” is one.

Rules and templates

Flag anything at or below a rating you choose, notify on a keyword that matters to you, and draft from the template matching the rating band, with your name, location and issue filled in.

Multi-location

Each location carries its own average rating and its own unreplied count, and links to its own Google listing.

A public trust page

Reviews at or above a rating you set, with the overall average and the share of reviews you have replied to. It shows nothing at all rather than publishing a 0.0 when there is no data yet.

An append-only activity trail

Syncs and how many reviews they moved, location links, replies and who published them, connections — and failures, with their reason.

The day, in the order it happens

Nobody sits down to do review management. What happens is a Tuesday.

  1. 9:04

    The one that actually needs you first

    A dozen reviews arrived overnight. Two matter this morning; the other ten can wait. Every review carries a triage score, and the weighting is deliberate rather than tidy: severity is 60% of it and it is squared, so a one-star separates properly from a two-star instead of sitting a hair above it. Age is 25% on a curve that saturates at a fortnight, and the number of distinct complaints is the last 15%. Replied reviews score zero.

  2. 9:11

    The reply, and the one rule behind it

    You write the reply here and it publishes to Google. The order matters more than it sounds like it should: the reply goes to Google first and is only recorded on this side once Google has accepted it. If Google refuses — expired permission, an outage, a policy rejection — nothing is written down here, so your inbox never shows a reply the customer will never see.

  3. Thursday

    The one nobody answered

    The review that damages you is rarely the angriest one. It is the ordinary two-star from last week that everyone assumed somebody else had picked up, sitting under your listing with no reply. Multiple locations make that failure easy, so each location carries its own unreplied count and the triage queue keeps stale complaints near the top as they age.

  4. Friday

    The average moved. Did it, though?

    Two annoyed customers in a quiet fortnight can pull a small location's average down by a tenth of a star. That is arithmetic on a small sample, not a crisis. So an alert is not raised because a number went down — the last seven days are compared against the seven before with Welch's t-test, and nothing fires unless the difference clears p < 0.05.

What people are complaining about

Reading a hundred reviews to work out that it is the parking again is not a good use of anybody’s morning. Themes are tagged by matching whole words and phrases, with negation scoping and a polarity check, so a compliment never lands in the complaints pile.

Separately, a log-odds ratio with an informative Dirichlet prior surfaces the words that genuinely separate your low-rated reviews from your high-rated ones — including issues nobody thought to write a rule for. When the corpus is too small for any term to clear significance, the panel says so instead of presenting noise as a finding.

The page you can point customers at

Every organisation gets a public page showing its reviews at or above a rating you set, with the overall average and the share of reviews you have replied to.

The reply rate is on there on purpose. It is the one number on a trust page a business cannot improve by collecting more happy customers. Before any reviews have synced the page shows nothing at all, rather than publishing a 0.0 next to your name.

What connecting to Google actually involves

Four steps, and the first one is not on anybody’s timetable but Google’s.

  1. 01

    Google gates access to the Business Profile API behind an approval request. Nothing syncs until that approval is in place, and how long it takes is Google's decision. Any page promising a one-click connection is skipping this step.

  2. 02

    Authorise the Google account that manages your listings. The only scope requested is business.manage, which is the minimum that grants review access.

  3. 03

    Link each of your locations to its Google listing.

  4. 04

    Sync. Reviews arrive, themes are tagged, and the triage queue orders itself.

What it does not do

Shorter than the other list, and more useful when you are deciding.

  • There is no AI in it. The insights come from named statistical methods you can look up — Welch's t-test, log-odds with a Dirichlet prior — computed on your own reviews. Nothing is sent to a language model.

  • It cannot delete a customer's review. Google does not allow that through any API. You can reply, delete your own reply, hide a review inside this app only, or open Google's report flow.

  • Hiding is local. A hidden review disappears from your inbox. It stays exactly where it was on Google.

  • It does not scrape anything. Competitor ratings are the ones you type in yourself.

  • There is no billing. No plans, no checkout, no trial. That is why there is no price on this page.

A record of what happened, including what failed

Everything the system does is written to an append-only activity trail: syncs and how many reviews they moved, location links, replies and who published them, Google connections — and failures, with their reason.

The failures are what makes the rest of it worth anything. A log that only records successes is marketing.

Getting an account

Setting up an organisation — creating your locations, connecting Google, linking each location to its listing — is done with an administrator rather than through a checkout. That is why there is no plan picker on this page and no price to compare.

Already set up? The inbox is one click away.