Importing reviews

Bring reviews a brand already has — from Google, Trustpilot, G2, Capterra, a Senja or Testimonial.to account, a spreadsheet — into Akteora. Each becomes a text testimonial, labelled with where it came from, unapproved and private until someone publishes it.

The dashboard does this from a CSV file (Inbox → Import reviews); the step-by-step guide for customers, including saving from Excel, Google Sheets and Numbers, is at akteora.com/guides/import-reviews. The API takes the same rows as JSON, so an integration can import straight from its own data without a file.

What an imported review is

These hold everywhere, and are not settings:

• The words are kept exactly as sent. They are the testimonial's original text, which nobody — the organisation included — can edit afterwards.
• It is always labelled. The widget, the public wall and its permalink pages show "Imported from Google", linked to source.url when there is one, whatever else the widget is set to show. Exports carry origin, source and reviewed_at.
• Its rating is never averaged. An imported review shows its own stars, but the wall's rating, the widget heading's rating and the wall's AggregateRating markup count collected testimonials only. It is never marked up as a Schema.org Review, which Google's policy forbids for reviews copied from another site.
• No consent record is invented. The customer never saw your consent wording, and the API does not pretend they did.
• No webhooks. Importing sends no submission.created or submission.ready: those mean a customer has just sent something. Approving an imported review later sends submission.approved as usual, with origin: "imported" and link_id: null.

Why it works this way is recorded in ADR 0014.

Import rows

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $AKTEORA_API_KEY" -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{
    "brand_id": "brd_…",
    "source": { "name": "Google", "url": "https://g.page/r/your-business" },
    "attested": true,
    "rows": [
      {
        "text": "They rebuilt our onboarding in two weeks.",
        "name": "Maria López",
        "title": "Head of Operations",
        "company": "Fernhill Studio",
        "rating": 5,
        "reviewed_at": "2025-03-14",
        "source_url": "https://g.page/r/your-business/review/1"
      }
    ]
  }' \
  https://api.akteora.com/v1/imports

201 Created:

{ "import_id": "imp_…", "created": 1, "duplicate_rows": [], "origin": "imported" }

Needs the submissions:write scope. A signed-in member must be an owner or admin (submission:import): importing is vouching for content on the organisation's behalf.

The body

Each row:

The attestation

attested: true means agreeing, on the organisation's behalf, to exactly this:

These are genuine reviews written by real customers. I am copying them without changing their words, and I have the right to use them.

The wording is stored with the import, with the member or API key that sent it and when, and the import is written to the organisation's audit log. There is no import without it.

What refuses an import

• Any invalid row refuses the whole request with 422, and nothing is written. Each problem names its row: rows.3.rating is the fourth row's rating.
• A review dated in the future is a 422 naming the row.
• Over the plan's allowance is 402 plan_limit_exceeded, with limit.name imported_reviews. Only reviews that would be created count — duplicates do not.
• A brand that is not yours is 404.

Sending the same rows again

A review already imported for the brand — the same source, name and words, ignoring case and spacing — is skipped, and its 1-based position is in duplicate_rows. It is not an error. So an import interrupted halfway can be sent again from the start, and the second run creates only what the first did not.

List imports

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $AKTEORA_API_KEY" https://api.akteora.com/v1/imports

The latest 50, newest first, each with created_count, duplicate_count, the attestation_text agreed to, and who agreed: attested_by_user_id or api_key_id. Needs submissions:read.

Find imported reviews

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $AKTEORA_API_KEY" \
  'https://api.akteora.com/v1/submissions?origin=imported&is_approved=false'

origin also filters exports. Publish one as you would any testimonial: POST /v1/submissions/{id}/approve, then POST /v1/submissions/{id}/visibility.

Allowances

imported_reviews is a standing total, not monthly: Free 50, Starter 500, Core 5,000, Plus unlimited. Test mode allows 100. Deleting an imported review frees its place.

The CSV the dashboard reads

The dashboard's importer turns a CSV into these rows in the browser; the file itself is never uploaded. UTF-8 (a file in another encoding is refused, not guessed at), separated by commas, semicolons or tabs — detected from the header line, so European Excel's semicolons work — with a header row and one review per row. Header names are matched ignoring case, spaces, - and _, and can be corrected on screen:

A template is at https://app.akteora.com/akteora-import-template.csv.