How to get data out of Google Maps without code

A Maps listing is filled in by two parties. Google, from its own index, and the owner, through a business profile.

What you can see on a listing:

• Name, full address, and the map coordinates
• Phone number, where the owner added one
• Website link, where the owner added one
• Category, plus the smaller categories under it
• Star rating and review count
• Opening hours, and whether it says permanently closed
• Photos, and sometimes a price level
• Whether the owner has claimed the listing

What is never on a listing:

• An email address. Maps has no email field at all.
• The owner’s name, unless it sits in the business name.
• Company number, VAT number, or staff count
• Revenue, or any hint of it

1. Copy it by hand

Open each listing and type the fields into a sheet. It sounds silly and it is the right first move.

You learn the shape of the data, you see how many firms in your trade have no site, and you spend nothing.

It falls apart at scale, and it falls apart fast. Treat it as research, not as a pipeline.

2. A browser extension

An extension reads the results page you are already looking at and writes the visible rows to CSV. Cheap, fast, no setup.

Two limits show up in week one. Maps shows a slice of results per search, so the extension never sees past that slice. And it runs on your own logged-in account, which carries account risk.

Check the terms of any tool before you install it. We do not ship an extension, so we have nothing to sell you here.

3. A hosted scraper

You give a website a search term and an area, it runs the crawl on its own machines, and you download a file.

This clears both extension limits. Nothing runs on your account, and the service can work around the per-search cap by splitting the map into smaller squares.

You pay per run, and you wait. A wide search across a country can take hours, and you pay again next month when the data goes stale.

4. An indexed database

Somebody has already run the crawl, followed each website for an email, and stored the result with a date on it. You filter and export.

This is what we sell, so weigh the next sentence accordingly. You trade freshness control for speed: the row is true as of the crawl date, not as of your click.

What you get back is the filtering. No website, has email, rating below four, unclaimed listing. Those questions are cheap against an index and painful against a live crawl.

• By hand: free, tiny, and the best teacher.
• Extension: cheap and quick, capped per search, runs on your account.
• Hosted scraper: no cap and no local risk, pay per run, slow on wide areas.
• Database: instant filters and stored emails, as fresh as the last crawl.

Our export runs 64 columns per row, on every plan. The ones that change how you work:

• Name, street, postcode, region and coordinates
• Phone, plus a flag for whether it reaches a mobile
• Email, plus the page we found it on, so you can check our working
• Website, plus a flag for the rows that have none
• Rating, review count, and whether the owner claimed the listing
• Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, where the listing carries them
• Opening hours, price level, and the full category tree
• First seen and last seen, so you know how old every row is

Three of those are worth more than the rest put together.

1. The no-website flag. It turns a directory into a prospect list. Everything else is nice to have.
2. The source page for the email. You can open it and see where the address came from. A vendor who cannot show you this is guessing.
3. First seen and last seen. Age is the only honest measure of a local file. A row with no date is a row you cannot trust.

One more thing to check before you buy from anyone. Ask what happens to your file when you cancel. Ours stays yours. We do not delete customer exports, and we are not going to start.

The first question is about the platform. The second is about the people in the data.

The platform question

Google’s terms govern what you may do with Google’s service. Read them before you point a tool at Maps, and read the terms of any tool you install.

We are not going to tell you to breach a terms of service, and you should be wary of any vendor that does. The Places API exists as the route Google itself offers, and it is the safest place to start.

The data protection question

A business address is not always personal data, and sometimes it is. A sole trader’s name and mobile number is personal data even though the trade is a business.

In the EU and the EEA, B2B contact for a related product usually rests on legitimate interest under Article 6(1)(f) of the GDPR. That basis is a test you have to pass, not a box you tick.

You also owe people an explanation. Article 14 of the GDPR covers what to tell someone when you got their data from somewhere else, and by when.

Our GDPR guide walks through the balancing test and the opt-out duty. None of it is legal advice.

The part everyone skips

Public does not mean unrestricted. Data being visible to anyone does not empty it of protection, and regulators have said so more than once.

The practical version is short. Use it for what a reasonable business owner would expect, keep the volume sane, honour every opt-out, and keep a record of where each row came from.

1. Pick a trade and town you know. Somewhere you can sanity check the answer without opening a browser.
2. Count the results yourself in Maps. Rough is fine. You want to know whether the tool returns a tenth of the market or most of it.
3. Check ten rows by hand. Open the listing. Does the phone match? Does the no-website flag hold up? Is the firm still open?
4. Look for the date. If the file carries no crawl date, you have no idea what you bought. Walk away.
5. Test the email fields. Open the source page for three of them. If the vendor cannot show a source, the address is a guess.
6. Ask what happens on cancellation. Some tools delete your exports when you stop paying. Ask in writing before you start.

Run that on any vendor, including us. A file that survives it is a file you can build a quarter on.