Laravel Query Grouping

I just wanna ask if my approach is good? I have a api respopnse which a merchants where i want to do is that if merchants with the same group_id appeared more than once i will put it on a group of merchants then exclude all the merchants that part in a group in a merchants that appeared once only. I do here is that get the group_ids then loop through there and after fetching exclude the group_ids appeared more than once[enter image description here][1]

    $merchantsHaveGroupId = $merchants->whereNotNull('group_id')->get();
    
    $groupIds = $merchantsHaveGroupId->pluck('group_id')->toArray();
    $groupIds = array_count_values($groupIds);

    $numOfMerchantsToBeOnParent = 1;
    
    $listOfMerchantWillBeExcluded = [];
    $parentData = []; 
   
    foreach($groupIds as $key => $value){
        if($value > $numOfMerchantsToBeOnParent){
            $merchantGroupParent = MerchantGroup::find($key);
            $children = $merchantGroupParent->merchants()->whereIn('id',$ids);
            $childrenIds = $children->pluck('id')->toArray();
            $constructData = array(
                "id" => $key,
                "title" => $merchantGroupParent->title,
                "isParent" => true,
                "children_count" => $groupIds[$key],
                "children_merchants" => $children->get()->toArray(),
                "childrens_ids" => $childrenIds
            );
            array_push($parentData, $constructData);
            array_push($listOfMerchantWillBeExcluded, $key);
        }
    }

   
    // now exclude the found ids now part of a group
    $merchants = $merchants->whereNotIn('group_id',$listOfMerchantWillBeExcluded);
    
    $merchants = Merchant::sortRestaurants($merchants, $favorites, $cityautoassign);

 
    // for pagination
    $merchants = $merchants->toArray();

    // merge merchants
    if(!empty($parentData)){
        $merchants = array_merge($parentData,$merchants);
    }

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