FAQs

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Why do my BrightLocal reviews stop at a certain number?

Reviews are pulled in date order and capped at 10 pages per refresh. Businesses with a very large review history may not have every historical review ingested in a single refresh — the newest reviews come through first, and the oldest ones beyond the cap are not fetched. This is a fetch-volume limit, not a connection problem. For reporting on review trends and recent reputation, the fetched set covers the most recent activity. For lifetime totals across the entire review history, use the Total review count and Average rating fields instead of counting individual review rows — those are lifetime aggregates that are not affected by the page cap.

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Why is my citation report data up to 6 hours old?

Citation data is served from a cached snapshot of a BrightLocal Citation Tracker report. To avoid re-running a report that BrightLocal generated only moments ago, the connector reuses a recent run: if the report was last generated within roughly the past 6 hours and is not still processing, those results are fetched as-is rather than triggering a fresh run. As a result, citation figures can lag live directory listings by up to about 6 hours. This is expected behavior for the Citation mode, not a stalled sync. Newly changed listings appear once a fresh run completes on a later cycle. For the underlying refresh schedule, see the BrightLocal data reference.

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Why can’t I see Total review count or Average rating on my citation data source?

Total review count and Average rating are lifetime review aggregates that exist only in Review mode. They are computed from the business profile’s full review history, so they have no equivalent in a Citation Tracker report and are not available on a Citation data source. To report on these figures, use a data source created in Review mode against the business profile URL. A Citation data source surfaces directory-listing fields — listing status, directory name, and authority signals such as domain authority and MozRank — rather than review aggregates.

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Can one data source track both reviews and citations?

No. Each BrightLocal data source runs in exactly one mode, chosen when it is created, and the two modes are mutually exclusive:

• Review mode binds to a business profile URL and returns individual reviews plus lifetime review aggregates.
• Citation mode binds to a Citation Tracker report ID and returns directory listings with authority signals.

To cover both, create two data sources — one per mode. The same applies to tracking a second business or a second report: each profile URL or report ID needs its own data source. Both can then be combined on one dashboard, or blended together in a Blend Data widget.

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Why does my available field list differ between reviews and citations, or change over time?

BrightLocal is a report-driven, schema-on-read data source. It has no fixed catalog of metrics and breakdowns — the available fields are discovered from the columns present in the returned report for the active mode. Review data sources and Citation data sources therefore expose different field sets, and a small number of fields (such as Rating, Domain authority, and MozRank) are typed explicitly by the connector. Because fields are resolved from the report itself, the list can shift if BrightLocal adds, renames, or omits a column: the change appears in the field list after the next refresh. Numeric columns become metrics; text, date, and URL columns can serve as breakdowns.

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