Introducing to all clients, an industry-first review timeline visibility that captures the complete evolution of customer feedback across your Google Business Profile location reviews.
Historically, when a review is updated, Google deletes the record of the original review, replacing it with the update. Additionally, unlike some other review sites such as TripAdvisor, Google only allows one review per reviewer per location. This means that if a user wants to write another review for the same place, their only option is to update their previous review, which removes visibility to their initial comment and may change their star rating with no visibility as to what caused it.
With this update, users can now access the complete history of reviews left on Google, including every data point and edit. By keeping the initial review's record, this enhancement allows clients to analyze review updates over time, identify changes influenced by responses or repeat visits, and offers transparency in customer feedback evolution—key for reputation management. Additionally, it provides clarity as to why certain reviews may not appear in reports for specific timeframes.
In this comprehensive Review Timeline, currently exclusively offered by LocalClarity, you will not only gain visibility to the initial review and its update, but also to when, how, and where it was received, responded to, and updated. Understanding the changes resulting from review responses and repeated customer visits provides transparency in your customer feedback evolution and thus deeper insights into your active customer base.
Everything is now visible in the ReviewsInbox app. Starting in the top filters, you can now filter to only those reviews that have triggered an updated record from Google.
The review download process has also been updated to include a second option. Now you can choose between the standard file export with exhaustive details on each review record or the new option that focuses on the version history of all the reviews within the selected timerange and filters. It is this file that will be used to answer questions such as "what is my average number of location reviews per customer?", "how many reviews have upgraded ratings after a response follow-up?", and "which types of reviews tend to get removed?".
Next, you will see a design update in the center column where all reviews with updates will be marked with a little bubble over the Google icon that represents how many versions of a specific review have been received.
The focus of the update can be found in the review detail section where a new tab navigation is presented. The default is the "Overview" which presents the full current review details, but now you can click into the "Timeline" for a full record of all review milestones.
This section presents each significant stage of a review's timeline, starting with creation and followed by automations, assignments, responses, and then any edits we ever record from Google.
The incremental timeline data is only available on a go-forward basis as the platforms records and indexes each review flow step. Historic reviews will continue to show their creation date and, if edited, the timestamp of the update. The version content, ratings and comments, will present identically.
You may occasionally see a review marked as "updated" even though the content appears identical to the original. This occurs when a reviewer edits their review within minutes of posting it, even before LocalClarity receives the initial version. Google still applies an "updated" flag to these reviews, even though you're seeing what is essentially the same content. We're considering adding a time threshold feature that would only flag reviews as updated after a meaningful timeframe has passed.
While this enhancement provide a material increase in total reputation context and visibility to brands and agency clients, we are planning an additional releases that include sentiment analysis scoring updates (both for updated reviews and custom AI model applications) and visibility to all the feedback left by a reviewer (both for your brand and even your indexed competitors).
