How Styka Uses Your Google Business Data

TL;DR

Styka reads your public Google Business profile to build your website. Your site shows a selection of your public Google reviews — each with the reviewer's name, a star rating, and a link back to Google — alongside your current rating. Photos come from your Google listing, and you can replace them with your own before you publish. Your site stays a private draft until you choose to publish it.

Reviews

Your site displays a selection of your public Google reviews — the star rating, the review text, the reviewer's name, and how long ago it was posted. We don't display reviewers' profile photos. Each review is shown as it appears on Google, with the reviewer credited.

We show a subset of your reviews (up to six), favoring higher-rated ones. Because that's a curated selection, every review section carries a "Selected from public Google reviews" note and a "Read all on Google" link, so visitors can see the full, current set on your Google Maps profile. You can edit, reorder, or remove any review in the editor before you publish.

Google Maps Rating

When you generate or regenerate your site, we fetch your current Google Maps rating once and display it. We don't refresh it on a background schedule — it updates only when you regenerate. If a long time has passed since your last regen, your displayed rating may be out of date; the "View all on Google" link always points to the current value.

We don't display your total review count. A live counter creates a freshness expectation we'd rather not set on a page that's built once and served as a snapshot.

Photos

The photos on your site are pulled from your public Google Business listing. You can hide, reorder, or replace any of them with your own uploads in the editor — and we recommend uploading your own photos before you publish, so your site reflects images you own. Photos sourced from Google appear with Google Maps attribution.

Publishing & Your Control

When Styka generates your site, it starts as a private draft that isn't publicly visible. You can edit the copy, swap in your own photos, curate which reviews appear, and adjust your branding. When you're happy with it, you click Publish to make it live. Until then, only you can see it — so nothing about your business goes public until you've reviewed and approved it.

How We Handle the Data

The data we use to build your site is limited to what's publicly available on your Google Business profile. We avoid sending review text to third-party analytics or error-tracking tools, and your rating is stored together with the date we fetched it so the page never claims more freshness than it has.

Questions

If you have specific compliance questions — especially for regulated industries (healthcare, legal, financial services) — email us at [email protected] before launching a customer site. We're happy to walk through how the architecture applies to your situation.