Skip to content

Our Google presence — your reviews dashboard

If you’ve ever opened Google Maps in the morning to check overnight reviews, then closed the tab without really knowing whether things are going well or badly — this page is built for you. Our Google presence turns your own Google Maps listing into a dashboard: the most useful chart at the top, an AI-written read of what your customers are saying right below, and your most recent reviews in a compact card you can scan in seconds. Open it once a day. You’ll know.

What it does

Your Google Business Profile is the most-read description of your restaurant in the world. People search the name, glance the rating, scroll a handful of reviews, and decide whether to walk in. The page mirrors that public-facing view back to you so you can act on it without leaving the admin app — but it puts the story first.

The first thing you see after the header is a 90-day trend chart. Bars show how many new reviews landed each day. A line, sitting on top of the bars, shows your rolling 7-day average rating. The chart answers the question that matters most: am I trending up or down? A line drifting upward over the last month is a sign that the kitchen is doing right by guests; a line slipping lower is a nudge to look closer at what changed.

Directly under the chart sits the AI insights panel. Once a night, after the system pulls your latest reviews, an AI reads the last 90 days of them and writes back four things: what customers love (three to five themes with short supporting quotes), what needs work (same), an overall trend pill (trending up, trending down, or steady), and one specific recommendation for this week — a single sentence you can act on, not a generic platitude. The panel refreshes itself automatically; you can also click Refresh insights anytime you want a fresh read.

Below the AI panel sits the multi-column dashboard: four small cards side by side on a wide screen, stacked on mobile. Recent reviews (compact — five at a time, click any one to expand it for the full text), recent posts (a 2x2 thumbnail grid), a rating distribution bar chart (how often you get 5-stars vs 4 vs 3 vs 2 vs 1), and a reviewer mix card showing the share of your reviews that come from Google Local Guides (the higher-signal reviewers) versus regular accounts.

The rule

Read once a day, act once a week. The trend chart and the AI’s one-line recommendation are your scorecard — if the trend dips and the recommendation flags a recurring complaint, that’s the thing to fix this week.

How to use it

Open Growth → Our Google presence in the sidebar. If you haven’t connected your listing yet, the page asks you for one thing: your Google Maps URL. Open Google Maps on your phone (or the web), search for your restaurant, tap the Share button on the listing panel, and copy whatever link Google gives you — it usually starts with maps.app.goo.gl or google.com/maps. Paste that into the box, click Save, and the system starts tracking your listing automatically.

When you click Sync now, you’ll see a step-by-step progress display while the system pulls your reviews. A typical sync takes about 30 seconds. The KPI tiles dim slightly while the sync runs so you can see at a glance that data is refreshing.

Once connected, the page lays out in this order, top to bottom: the header (tracked URL + Sync now), a KPI strip with four tiles (Avg rating, Reviews 28d, Response rate, Posts 28d), the trend chart, the AI insights panel, and the multi-column dashboard.

Reading the KPIs

Four tiles, left to right: Avg rating (your Google star average), Reviews (28d) (how many landed in the last four weeks), Response rate (the share of all reviews that have an owner reply), and Posts (28d) (how many local posts you published on Google in the last 28 days). The Response rate tile is the one to watch. A venue that replies to every review reads as engaged to anyone scrolling the listing.

(If you’ve completed the official Google Business Profile connection in the Connections page, two more tiles appear here — Views over the last 28 days and Views over the last 7 days — pulling traffic numbers directly from Google. Until that connection lands, the system reads only public review data and those traffic tiles stay hidden rather than showing zeros.)

Reading the trend chart

The chart has two stories on the same canvas. The purple bars (left axis) show how many new reviews you got each day in the last 90 days — most healthy days are zero or one, busy stretches can spike to three or four. The amber line (right axis) is your rolling 7-day average rating, smoothed so one outlier review doesn’t make the line jump. Look at the line’s direction, not its day-to-day wobble: trending up means your last four weeks of reviews are scoring higher than the four weeks before; trending down means the opposite. The summary block on the right shows the 90-day total + your current rolling rating in one glance.

Reading the AI insights

The AI’s job is to do the reading for you. After every sync, it reads the last 90 days of reviews and synthesises four things:

  • What customers love — three to five short themes, each with a short quote in italics. (“Pasta consistency: ‘best carbonara I’ve had in months’.”) These are the strengths you can lean into when planning new dishes, menus, or marketing.
  • What needs work — three to five complaints clustered into themes. (“Service speed on Fridays: ‘waited 40 minutes for our main’.”) These are the patterns you can actually fix.
  • The trend pill — top right: trending up, trending down, or steady. It looks at whether your most recent reviews score higher or lower than the earlier ones in the window.
  • This week’s focus — one sentence in the amber card at the bottom of the panel. The AI picks the strongest signal it saw and turns it into a directive you can act on this week: “Run a pasta-quality check on Friday nights for the next two weeks; your reviewers consistently mention pasta as your standout, and a soft week could shake confidence.”

The panel auto-refreshes after each nightly sync. You can also click Refresh insights at any time to regenerate from the latest reviews; that uses a small amount of your AI credits.

Browsing recent reviews

The Recent reviews card on the dashboard shows your five newest reviews in a compact layout — stars + reviewer name + how long ago, with the body clamped to two lines. Click any review to expand it for the full text. A small green replied badge appears on cards you’ve already answered. Click See all N reviews to expand the card and bring up the full filter row (All / Unreplied / Replied tabs and star-rating chips) — useful when you want to triage everything left unreplied.

Replying to a review

The fastest path today is to tap through to your Google Business app on your phone — once your reply is posted there, it shows up on the card here within a day (the next nightly sync) and the card moves into the Replied state automatically.

Once the direct-reply integration is approved by Google for your venue, an inline reply box appears on each expanded review card so you can type and post the reply right inside the admin app. The reply lands on Google instantly and the card moves into Replied in a second or two.

Rating distribution + reviewer mix

The two smaller cards on the bottom row of the dashboard give you the demographics. Rating distribution is a horizontal bar chart — how many of your reviews are 5★, 4★, 3★, 2★, 1★. A healthy listing skews heavily toward 4-5★ with a thin tail of lower ratings. The colour coding (emerald for 4-5★, amber for 3★, rose for 1-2★) tells you at a glance where most of your reviews sit. Reviewer mix shows what share of your reviewers are Google Local Guides — the higher-signal accounts whose reviews count for more in the listing’s ranking. A healthy mix is around 30-50% Local Guides; a listing dominated by one-time reviewers is a sign the listing isn’t getting much organic discovery yet.

The photo wall

To the right of the recent-posts grid sits your photo wall: the most recent photos that appear on your Google listing — a mix of your own owner-uploaded shots and photos customers added when they reviewed you. Each tile carries a small badge in the corner: food, interior, menu, owner (uploaded by you), or customer (a guest photographed and shared it). The customer-posted photos are the most useful — they tell you which dishes are visually striking enough to make someone open their camera in the middle of a meal. Click any tile to open the full-size lightbox; use arrow keys to flip through.

Take a minute to scan it after each sync. If twelve of the last fifteen customer photos are of the same pasta, that’s a free piece of marketing intelligence — that dish belongs on Instagram and at the top of the menu in your next print run. Conversely, if every photo is of the dining room (and none of the food), it might be worth styling a few signature dishes for a fresh shoot the chef can hand to Google directly.

Below the recent reviews card on the right sits the popular times heatmap: a 7-row × 24-column grid showing how busy your venue is hour-by-hour across the week. Greener cells mean busier (the scale runs from quiet sky-blue to deep emerald); the current hour is highlighted with an amber ring so you can find “right now” instantly. Hover any cell for the exact busyness number from 0 to 100.

Read it for off-peak opportunities, not just for the obvious peaks. Friday 7-9pm being deep green is unsurprising. Tuesday 3-5pm sitting in the lightest tier of the ramp is a slot you can attack — a Tuesday-only antipasto promotion, an early-bird wine flight, a Tuesday-night collaboration with a local supplier — anything that turns a quiet afternoon into a half-full one is worth more than another marketing push on your already-packed Friday.

If popular times shows you’re empty Tuesday 3-5pm and packed Friday 7-9pm, run a promotion for Tuesday afternoon, not for Friday evening.

If the heatmap shows “Popular times aren’t available for your listing yet”, that’s normal — Google needs a few months of foot traffic before they release the data. It’ll appear automatically once the threshold is met.

Customer questions

Below the photo wall, on the right side of the dashboard, sits the customer questions card. Strangers ask questions on Google Maps before deciding to visit — “Do you take reservations for groups of 8?”, “Do you have a gluten-free pasta option?”, “Is the kitchen open until 11pm on weeknights?”. These questions are public and stick around forever. Anyone who lands on your listing sees them.

The card shows the top five questions, the top answer for each, and a small No answer yet pill on any question that has zero responses. If a customer has answered (guessing, often), you’ll see their name. If you’ve answered, the answer carries a green Owner badge that signals authority to whoever’s reading. Read it the same way you’d read your own FAQ — every question without an owner answer is a question costing you walk-ins, and the fix takes thirty seconds in the Google Maps app.

People also search for

At the very bottom of the page sits the People also search for strip — Google’s own answer to “who are this venue’s competitors?”. Each card shows a venue Google’s algorithm has decided is an alternative to yours, with their current rating and review count, and a Track button that starts watching their Google reviews + posts on your Competitors page. One click. The dashboard sends the place URL to the existing competitor flow, which resolves it, dedupes against anyone you’re already tracking, and kicks off the first sync.

This is the cold-start cure for competitive intelligence: instead of you having to remember who your rivals are, Google tells you, and you decide whether to watch them.

When the system finds menu, reservation, or online-ordering links on your Google listing, they appear as coloured chips in the header next to your phone and website — Menu in amber, Book on chope.co (or whichever booking partner Google shows) in blue, Order on foodpanda.co.th (or whichever delivery partner) in purple. Each chip opens the destination in a new tab so you can verify Google is sending guests to the right URL.

This matters more than it looks. Google’s panel surfaces a Menu button, a Find a table button, or an Order online button only when it has detected an active link for that pathway. If a chip is missing here, the corresponding button is missing on your public listing — which means a customer searching your name on a Friday at 7pm doesn’t see a one-tap path to reserve a table, and you lose them to the next venue down the list.

Read it as a quick checklist. If your menu chip is missing but you have a PDF menu on your website, add a link to it on the Google Business app under Menu. If the booking chip is missing and you do take reservations, wire your reservation provider into your listing. If the ordering chip is missing and you offer delivery, link your delivery partner page. Each chip costs nothing to add and earns you another conversion path.

The AI also reads these chips. When it writes your weekly recommendation it won’t suggest “publish your menu” if the menu chip is already there — it’ll focus on the gap instead.

Refreshing your data

When you click Sync now in the header, the system pulls a complete refresh: your reviews, your photo wall, your popular times, your customer questions, and your “people also search for” list — all in one go. A typical full sync takes about 30 seconds. The four-step progress display in the header shows what’s happening: connecting, pulling reviews, saving the rich data (photos + times + Q&A + related places), and reading insights.

You don’t have to click Sync now manually — the system runs the same sync every night around 3am local time. But if you’ve just changed something on your listing (a new photo, a fresh Q&A answer, an updated hours block), clicking Sync now gives you the new state immediately.

Worked example

Marco runs Friday dinner service at iO Osteria Sukhumvit 31. He’s been wondering if the new pasta supplier is paying off and whether the recent Friday service tweaks have helped.

He opens the admin app on Sunday morning, taps Growth → Our Google presence in the sidebar, and lands on the page. The trend chart shows a clear upward line over the last three weeks — the rolling rating has crept from 4.2 to 4.4 across April. The summary block on the right of the chart reads “23 reviews · 4.41 rolling ★”. That alone tells him the supplier switch + service tweaks are working.

He scrolls to the AI insights panel. The trend pill says Trending up. Under “What customers love” the AI lists:

  • Carbonara consistency: ‘best carbonara in Sukhumvit, hands down’
  • Service warmth: ‘Marco himself came over to ask how the meal was’
  • Wine pairings: ‘the recommended Chianti was perfect with the pasta’

Under “What needs work” the AI lists two things — noise level on Friday nights (“we couldn’t hear ourselves across the table”) and dessert variety (“only two desserts, both very rich”). In the amber This week’s focus card the AI writes: “Add one lighter dessert option for the summer menu — three reviewers in the last month flagged dessert variety, and one specifically asked for sorbet.”

Marco doesn’t need to scroll the reviews list himself; the AI has done it. He notes the dessert idea on his menu planning sheet, opens the Composer in another tab to draft a Sunday-funday post about the new pasta supplier, and closes the page. Two minutes total.

He glances at the photo wall on his way out: nine of the last ten customer photos are of the carbonara. The same dish he just decided to feature in the Sunday post. The decision is no longer a hunch — it’s a vote from customers who reached for their cameras unprompted.

The popular times heatmap also catches his eye: Tuesday 3-5pm is the lightest cell on the entire grid. He makes a second note — a Tuesday-afternoon antipasto-and-wine flight to capture early diners — and adds it to next month’s plan. The Google data didn’t suggest the dessert OR the antipasto idea on its own; the AI’s read of the reviews plus the rich data context made both decisions obvious.

  • Competitors — see what other venues are posting and saying. Our Google presence is the same shape mirrored on your own data — the two pages let you compare “us” and “them” at a glance.
  • Composer — draft posts for Google (and Instagram and Facebook) from one screen. Posts you publish via the Composer show up here with the Drafted in Composer badge.
  • Connections — the page where you paste your Google Maps link so this dashboard can read your reviews, ratings, posts, and photos. (The older one-click Google Business Profile post-back connection has been removed from that page for now — see Connect Google Business Profile for status. This dashboard reads your public review data either way.)