# Introduction

The Reviews API turns customer reviews from across the open web into structured JSON. Every review carries its rating, author, language, publication date, and the item being reviewed.

## What counts as a review

A post from a review or discussion site that carries a numeric rating or is classified as a review. Reviews are their own product - the [News, Blogs & Forums APIs](news-blogs-forums-overview) exclude them.

## The review and its item

Each result pairs two things:

- **The review** - author, title, text, rating, language, publication date.
- **The item** (`item` object) - the reviewed page: source site, item title, country, total reviews and reviewers, domain rank.

## Coverage window

Each request returns reviews **published within the last 31 days**. By default it covers reviews crawled in the last 3 days; set `ts` to widen the window - see [Time Range](reviews-api-time-range). Older data - up to the last **5 years** - is available via the [News, Blogs, Forums & Reviews Archive](archive-what-is).

## How it works

1. Send a `GET` request with a boolean query - see [Quickstart](reviews-api-quickstart).
2. Read the matching reviews from the JSON response.
3. Follow the `next` URL to page through the rest - see [Pagination](reviews-api-pagination).

A matching segmentation endpoint returns aggregate counts (top sites, languages, ratings) instead of reviews - see [Segmentation API](reviews-api-segmentation).

> [!NOTE]
> The Reviews API shares its query language with the News, Blogs & Forums APIs - if you know one, you know both. See [Query Syntax](reviews-api-query-syntax).