Google Reviews: Place ID Workaround For Businesses Without a Physical Address

If you have a Google Business listing but do not have a physical address listed for the business, your Place ID will not be available using Google’s Place ID tool. Without a Place ID, the Google Reviews widget cannot display reviews for your business. In this documentation, we’ll show you how to find the Place ID for your business – even if your business doesn’t list a physical address.

Find Any Place ID

  1. Locate your business in a Google search.
  2. Inspect the Write a Review button. Do this by right-clicking on the button, and choosing “Inspect” (Chrome) or “Inspect Element” (Firefox).
  3. Inspector will now show you the code for the “Write a Review” button.
  4. Locate “data-pid” and copy the ID that follows.
  5. Enter this in the Google Reviews Place ID field.

Old Place_ID Format

If you’ve acquired your Place ID using the above steps but it is still not working, it is likely that the Place ID is using an outdated format.

If you would like to confirm that the Place ID is outdated, publish the page that contains the Google Reviews widget. Inspect the page, and select Console. You will see a console error in this case.

In this case, you will need to refresh your Place ID. There are tutorials on this process here, and in Google’s documentation here.

TO REFRESH YOUR PLACE ID

Important: If you have any API key restrictions in place, this process will fail. Temporarily remove API restrictions while performing the below steps. Learn more abut API key restrictions here.

  1.  Copy this URL: https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/details/json?placeid=<OLD_PLACE_ID>&fields=place_id&key=<YOUR_API_KEY>
  2. Paste the URL into a text editor.
  3. Where you see <OLD_PLACE_ID>, replace with your Place ID. Omit the “<” and “>”.
  4. Where you see <YOUR_API_KEY>, replace with your API key. Omit the “<” and “>”. Our Google Reviews documentation has instructions on acquiring your Google API if you need them.
  5. Copy the entire URL and place it into the address bar in a browser. It should look something like this:

    https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/details/json?placeid=ChIJdyh2Oo4d24gHr3CBtMz3Y4w&fields=place_id&key=NIzaSyDGF94eAhldU7tOVqqEDVnYgm_dqAURHhp
  6. Hit Enter.
  7. If the refresh request is successful, you will receive a status: OK and the refreshed place_id in the results:
    {     "html_attributions": [],     "result": {         "place_id": "ChIJb0PV8jOftUwRypG5jRXPCzs"     },     "status": "OK" }
  8. Copy the refreshed place_id and paste it into the Google Reviews widget.

NOT_FOUND AND INVALID_REQUEST STATUS CODES

You may receive a NOT_FOUND or INVALID_REQUEST status code after submitting a Place ID refresh request.

A response status of INVALID_REQUEST means that the Place ID entered in the refresh request is invalid (id is truncated or modified). Make sure that the full value of the Place ID is retrieved and then re-send the request.

If you receive a response status of NOT_FOUND, this means that the Place ID is already obsolete.  This happens if a business closes, moves to a new location or if a large-scale Google Maps database update has been implemented. If this is the case, you can re-issue the previous API call that retrieved the old place_id or make a new Find Place ID Only request.