When we opened up our Review Scraper API to the world in late 2018, we didn’t quite expect the response that we received. What started as a “scratch your own itch” project that generated the data that we needed for our own platform, turned into a commercial success with hundreds of companies big and small aggregating reviews with this API.
It’s been quite a ride since then, with lots of learnings to be had from the many different industries where this data is being used. The Review Index API is the result of that continuous learning, and we’re excited to launch it to the world today.
What is the Review Index API?
The Review Index API is what it says on the tin – an index of every single review profile in the world. Time and time again, users have come to us and said the same thing:
“I want reviews for Slack, but I don’t know where they have reviews!”
Slack is just an example here, but the reality is that every company today has reviews spread out on countless sites. Slack for example have reviews on sites like G2, Capterra, SoftwareAdvice, Gartner, Trustradius, Trustpilot and more.
This API solves exactly that problem by maintaining an index of all of the places where Slack (and millions of other companies) have reviews, and making those easily available to our users.
As a result, you can query our Review Index API with several inputs:
- Company name (eg.
Slack) - Domain name (eg.
slack.com) - Stock ticker (eg.
WORK) - ISIN (eg.
US83088V1026)
Based on that input, we’ll return the review profiles from our index along with their reviews:
How it works
At first glance, the problem that the Review Index API solves is an easy one, with increasing complexity once you go below the surface and operate at scale. These are the rough steps we are taking to provide this API:
- Build a database with every single review profile in existence
- Associate review profiles for the same entity (eg. company) with each other
- Enrich the entity with additional data like stock ticker, address
- Store the review data for those review profiles
- Expose this information to the world
We are continuously updating and improving this index based on new cases we find, and consistently add support for more review sites.
Use cases
Our closed beta has seen several use cases which are outlined below, though there are many other uses for this data.
Buy-side asset managers
The finance world lives and breathes data, and online review data is valuable to many different types of players, such as asset managers, hedge funds (systematic and discretionary traders), private equity and the buy-side in general.
As one example, larger hedge funds tend to trade upwards of a thousand stocks per day, at which scale it’s not feasible to manually find review profiles for a given company.
Competitor intelligence
Competitor intelligence providers are often given a list of companies to track in every sense of the word – whether it’s news, social media, pricing, and surprise – reviews. The largest companies are tracking hundreds of competitors, which means that every possible automation is welcome.
Analytics
Analytics providers process online reviews to extract actionable intelligence and insights with methods such as sentiment analysis, classification and other machine learning methods. These players are typically hyper-focused on data analysis as opposed to data aggregation, and our APIs help them focus on their strengths.
Review management
Onboarding large clients like hotel chains for review management can be quite challenging – the first step is always finding their review profiles. Considering that the larger companies have thousands of locations, with each location having 10+ review profiles, that can quickly become a nightmare – and this is where our Review Index API comes in handy.
Want to try it?
We are excited to launch the Review Index API to the world, and can’t wait to hear about your use case(s). We’re opening access up gradually and ask that you fill in our interest form to join the waitlist.
