ReplyOnTheFly Widget for Google Reviews

Description

Add your Google reviews to any WordPress page with a block or a shortcode. Six layouts, no Google API key, and no monthly fee.

The difference: your reviews are in the page, not painted on afterward.

Most Google reviews plugins draw themselves with JavaScript once the page has loaded. Visitors see the reviews. Google sees them too, because Google runs JavaScript. But the crawlers behind AI assistants do not. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews read the HTML your server sends and never execute a line of JavaScript. To them, a JavaScript review widget is an empty box.

This plugin writes the review text into the page itself, as real quotations with an author and a date:

<blockquote class="rotf-review">
  <p>Best wings in Miami. Our server kept the drinks coming all night.</p>
  <cite>Travon S. — 5 out of 5 on Google on <time datetime="2026-05-10">May 10, 2026</time></cite>
</blockquote>

That is what an AI crawler receives. Your visitors still get the live, interactive widget, which takes over the moment it loads. You maintain nothing.

Features

• Six layouts — carousel, grid, masonry, list, slider, and a compact star-rating badge, in light, dark, or automatic themes.
• Block and shortcode — drop in the Google Reviews block, or use [rotf_reviews] in any theme, template, or page builder that accepts shortcodes.
• No Google API key. No Google Cloud project, no billing account, no key to paste. Search for your business by name in the settings and pick it.
• Never slows your site. Reviews are fetched by a scheduled background job and stored in your database. Rendering a page only reads what is already there, so a slow or unreachable reviews service can never delay a page load.
• Survives outages. The last good set of reviews stays up until a newer set arrives, so a failed refresh is invisible to visitors.
• No layout shift. The block reserves its space before the widget loads, so your page does not jump.
• Filter by keyword, per page. A wedding page can show only the reviews that mention weddings. If nothing matches yet, it shows your most recent reviews instead of an empty space, and switches over on its own once a matching review arrives.
• Choose what shows — how many reviews, a minimum star rating, newest-first or best-first, rounded or square corners, header on or off.
• AI visibility reporting. Counts how often AI crawlers read your site and when visitors arrive from AI assistants, reported in your ReplyOnTheFly dashboard. Only your site’s hostname and aggregate counts are ever sent — see External Services.
• Optional business info sync. With a ReplyOnTheFly business key, the plugin keeps a LocalBusiness structured-data block and a visible name/address/hours block ([rotf_business_info]) in step with your live Google Business Profile. It stands down automatically if Yoast Local SEO or Rank Math’s Local module already writes that markup.
• Optional blog post import (off by default). Posts you approve in your ReplyOnTheFly account are created as normal WordPress posts twice a day, with images stored in your own media library. Once imported, a post belongs to you — the plugin never edits or deletes it.

Do I need an account?

No. Without one you get the five reviews Google’s public API hands out for any business. A free ReplyOnTheFly account raises that to your full synced review history, with keyword filtering and the option to pin or hide individual reviews. Either way the plugin is free, and there is no paid tier of this plugin to upgrade to.

A note on star ratings in search results

This plugin deliberately does not output review schema for your own reviews. Google does not allow review rich results for reviews about a business on that business’s own website, and names embedded review widgets specifically. A plugin that injected that markup anyway would earn no stars and risk a manual action. The [rotf_business_info] module writes LocalBusiness data, which is a different thing and is allowed.

Built by ReplyOnTheFly, which monitors Google reviews and drafts replies for business owners.

External Services

This plugin is a client for the ReplyOnTheFly reviews service. It connects to the endpoints below, all operated by ReplyOnTheFly and served over HTTPS:

1. Review data — https://www.replyonthefly.com/api/public/widget-reviews. Called by your server on a schedule (hourly, via WP-Cron) and when you save settings or click “Refresh now”. It sends the Google Place ID you configured and your site’s URL (in the request’s user agent, so we can identify misbehaving traffic). It returns the reviews Google makes available for that Place ID. No visitor data, cookies, or personal information is ever sent.

2. Business search — https://www.replyonthefly.com/api/tools/place-search. Called by your server only when an administrator types in the business search box on the settings screen. It sends the search text you typed and your site’s URL (in the request’s user agent) and returns matching Google Business listings so you can pick yours. Never called on the public site.

3. Widget script — https://www.replyonthefly.com/widget/reviews.js. Loaded in the visitor’s browser to display the live, interactive widget. The script requests the same review data endpoint from the browser; the request includes the standard referrer header, which tells the service which site is displaying the widget.

4. AI visibility measurement — https://www.replyonthefly.com/api/public/plugin/measure. Two kinds of reports, both containing only your site’s hostname and aggregate counts, never visitor identities, IP addresses, cookies, or browsing data: (a) your server reports, once per hour alongside the review refresh, how many times known AI crawlers (such as GPTBot or ClaudeBot) requested your pages, and receives back a Google site-verification token if you have asked ReplyOnTheFly to set up Search Console for you; (b) when a visitor arrives from an AI assistant (such as ChatGPT or Perplexity), the visitor’s browser sends a single event naming the assistant — nothing about the visitor. These numbers power the AI-visibility reporting in your ReplyOnTheFly dashboard. Reports from sites not linked to a ReplyOnTheFly account are discarded.

5. Business info sync — https://www.replyonthefly.com/api/public/site-kit. Only used when you have entered a ReplyOnTheFly business key in settings; called by your server on the same hourly schedule. It sends that key and your site’s URL (in the request’s user agent) and returns the LocalBusiness structured data and the visible name/address/hours block that ReplyOnTheFly generates from your live Google Business Profile. The first successful sync sends a single confirmation (.../api/public/site-kit/confirm) containing the business key and your site URL, so your ReplyOnTheFly dashboard can show the connection as active. No visitor data is ever sent.

6. Blog post import — https://www.replyonthefly.com/api/public/content-posts. Off by default; runs only if you have enabled the import option AND set a business key. Called by your server twice a day, it sends the business key and your site’s URL (in the request’s user agent) and returns blog posts you have already approved in your ReplyOnTheFly account, which are created as normal WordPress posts. Images referenced by those posts are downloaded from ReplyOnTheFly’s media hosting into your own media library so nothing is hotlinked. No visitor data is ever sent.

No data is sent to any other third party. Terms of service: https://www.replyonthefly.com/terms — Privacy policy: https://www.replyonthefly.com/privacy