Monitor restaurant ratings with Google Places, Gemini, Sheets, and Slack

What this workflow does

Automatically monitors restaurant ratings on Google Places daily, detects meaningful changes, uses Google Gemini AI to diagnose the root cause from real customer reviews, and delivers smart alerts to Slack — categorised as 🔴 Critical, 🟡 Watch, or 🟢 Positive.

Why it's unique

Most monitoring tools just tell you that a rating changed. RestaurantPulse tells you why — by reading actual customer reviews through AI and suggesting one concrete action to fix it.

How it works

1. Reads restaurant list from Google Sheets (add any restaurant via place_id)
2. Fetches live rating + reviews from Google Places API
3. Compares against last known state stored in Google Sheets
4. AI diagnoses root cause if change detected
5. Routes alert to Slack by severity level
6. Logs all alerts to Google Sheets for history

Prerequisites

• Google Places API key (console.cloud.google.com)
• Google Sheets OAuth2 credentials
• Google Gemini API key
• Slack OAuth2 credentials

Google Sheets Setup

Create a spreadsheet with two sheets:

Sheet 1 — restaurant_list
Columns: place_id | name | last_rating | last_review_count | last_checked

Sheet 2 — alert_history
Columns: timestamp | restaurant_name | old_rating | new_rating | rating_diff | alert_level | ai_diagnosis | place_id

How to find place_id

Call this URL in your browser:
https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/findplacefromtext/json?input=RESTAURANT+NAME+CITY&inputtype=textquery&fields=place_id,name&key=YOUR_KEY

Alert Levels

🔴 Critical — rating dropped 0.3+ points
🟡 Watch — rating dropped 0.1+ points OR 50+ new reviews
🟢 Positive — rating improved 0.2+ points

Sample Output