How to filter google reviews by keyword?

In this post, we'll cover how to search any company's reviews by keyword.

Filtering by keyword using Google's own filters

First of all, you can use Google's built-in keyword search to filter reviews by keyword.

Technically it works.

Google will filter out the reviews, and you'll be able to see only reviews that match your keyword exactly. The keyword is written in bold in the review text to identify it conveniently.

To access that search, just head over to your location's google maps listing, and hit the search icon, next to the sort menu.

One of the coolest things about this search feature is that it supports advanced syntax.

It seems to work with most of Google's advanced search operators, and it most definitely does with the basic "AND" / "OR" syntax.

So for example, if you wanted to surface all reviews that mention wine or sommelier, you could search "Wine OR Sommelier" like so

The google keyword search does have a few caveats though.

Main limits of Google's review keyword search feature

1. First, it's language specific. Meaning that when you search for a specific keyword, it will search the original review text for that keyword, and only return reviews that match exactly that keyword in the original review. If your keyword appears in a translated version of the review, that review won't show in the results. To be fair, you can mitigate this using advanced search syntax like "Wine" OR "Vin" for example, but multilingual search doesn't come natively.
2. As always, Google will show relative dates only, and not exact dates. If you're trying to pin down when a problem was mentioned for the first time, or how many times your staff members are mentioned each month, this won't really be helpful.
3. Google has a pretty cool AI tool on top of reviews that surfaces topics that are mentioned the most often. Unfortunately, this seems to completely ignore keyword search, so you're unable to drill down with both dimensions.

How to search Google reviews with reviewflowz

Now of course, going up against Google's UX is no small feat.

Especially when it comes to search.

But I do think we handle a few things a little bit better

First and foremost, we have exact dates for all google reviews. Yours, and your competitors.

This means if you want to figure out when something started being mentioned, or how often something is mentioned over time, you'll get a reliable answer using reviewflowz.

For example, the chart below shows the number of reviews that mentioned "wine" or "vin" or "sommelier" every month, and the average rating of those reviews.

Here's what that looks like for our example.

In 2024, there were 18 reviews mentioning one of those keywords, and the average rating was in general excellent when it's mentioned, except in June 2024, where we can see a clear spike in the number of reviews, and significant drop in the average rating.

Now this could be a single group that was really angry about the wine – or it could indicate a problem with the wine in June 2024.

Luckily, we can drill down super easily by scrolling to the positive / negative review breakdown

What this shows, despite limited volume, is that the wine pairing, in June 2024, seems to have been a lot more polarizing than every other month in 2024.

This wasn't a isolated incident or something, there were 3 very negative reviews that mentioned wine during that month.

And of course, if we want the actual reviews, we can still use the keyword search in the review list, and get the detailed reviews, with exact dates, and the ability to export those reviews to excel in one click

Updated on: 01/09/2025