Google Maps scraper: what it is, what data you get, and how to choose one (2026)

A Google Maps scraper is a tool that turns Google Maps search results into rows of data: business name, category, address, phone, website, rating, review count, hours, coordinates and Google's place ID. Google Maps doesn't show email addresses, so tools that sell "emails" get them from each business's own website, and the good ones check that the mailbox exists. When you choose one, look past the price per row. The things that decide whether a list is usable are how it gets past the per-search result cap, whether it keeps to your area and trade, and how it finds and verifies emails.

This guide covers what data you actually get, the four kinds of tool, the coverage problem most of them gloss over, how email finding works, a checklist for evaluating tools, and a pricing comparison with worked arithmetic. It's written so it's useful whatever you end up using.

Google Maps scraper vs Places API vs data vendor: the short version#

Four routes lead to a list of local businesses. This is how they differ at a glance.

If you want to see what a finished lead row looks like, download our sample export. The rows are fictional (.example domains, 555 phone numbers), but it shows every column and how the email grade, source and in-area flags look.

What does a Google Maps scraper do?#

A Google Maps scraper runs searches like "dentist in Phoenix, AZ" and records every listing that comes back as structured data. It does what you could do by hand: open each result, copy the name, phone and website into a spreadsheet. It just does it for thousands of businesses instead of twenty.

Under the hood, tools take one of two routes:

• Read the Google Maps interface, as a browser would, and parse the listings. Most scrapers, extensions and cloud actors work this way.
• Call Google's official Places API, which returns structured place data for a fee and under Google's Maps Platform terms.

Either way, the output is a table. Better tools then add a second stage: they visit each business's website to look for email addresses and social links, and verify the emails before handing them over.

What data can you get from Google Maps?#

You can get the public facts on a business's listing: identity, location, contact details, category, reputation and hours. You can't get email addresses from the listing itself, and owner names are not part of a listing either.

The API field names come from Google's Place data fields reference, which has no email or social field. The review and photo caps are in the Place resource reference: "A maximum of 5 reviews can be returned" and a maximum of 10 photos. If a tool advertises "50+ fields", count how many come from the listing, how many from the website, and how many are derived (like "has website: yes/no").

What kinds of Google Maps scraper are there?#

There are four broad types: browser extensions, desktop apps, cloud actors and scraping APIs, and lead tools that add email finding and verification. They differ mainly in where the work runs, how much they cover past the result cap, and what you get at the end.

Open-source options. If you code, free projects exist. The most-starred, gosom/google-maps-scraper on GitHub, is MIT-licensed. Free to run, but you supply servers, proxies and upkeep when Google changes its pages, and you still need an email stage and a verifier. Our free Google Maps scrapers guide compares the free routes.

If you sell to local businesses and need emails that don't bounce, the lead-tool category saves the most cleanup, and it's the category Leadraft is built in. The other three types hand you listing rows; finding emails, checking them and removing out-of-area rows are left to you.

Why do most scrapers miss businesses?#

Because a single Google Maps search stops after about 120 results, and the official Places API Text Search stops at 60. In a city with 900 dentists, a single search sees a small slice, chosen by Google's relevance ranking for that view of the map.

The fix is to split the area into smaller tiles and search each one, plus search several keyword variants per trade, then remove duplicates by place ID. Tools that do this well can find several times what one search shows. In one Leadraft run in Portland, a tiled search for "coffee shop" found 457 businesses against 230 from one plain search. That's one city and one keyword, so treat it as an illustration, not a rule. We explain the cap and the tiling method in why Google Maps stops at 120 results.

Ask any tool you're evaluating one question: "If I search a whole metro, how do you get past the per-search cap?" A vague answer usually means you'll get the first page of results and a bill for it.

How do Google Maps email extractors find emails?#

They don't extract emails from Google Maps, because Maps doesn't have them. A "Google Maps email extractor" takes the website from each listing, crawls that site, and pulls addresses from the pages where businesses publish them.

A careful extractor:

1. Visits the pages that hold contact details: home, contact, about, footer, privacy and legal pages, and the sitemap to find them.
2. Renders JavaScript for sites built on Wix, Squarespace or React, where the address only appears after the page runs scripts.
3. Filters junk: the web designer's address in the footer, example@domain.com placeholders, image file names that look like emails, tracking addresses.
4. Prefers addresses on the business's own domain (office@smithdental.com) over unrelated ones, and records the role (info@, office@, a named person) and the page it came from.
5. Verifies each address before calling it good.

Expect gaps. Not every business has a website, and not every website publishes an email. Some only have a contact form. In Leadraft's measurements, about 54% of business websites gave up an email address, and that's before verification. Any tool claiming an email for nearly every business is either guessing addresses or counting junk.

How is a found email verified?#

Verification checks that the mailbox exists without sending a message. The verifier looks up the domain's mail servers (its MX records), opens an SMTP conversation as described in RFC 5321, and asks whether the server would accept mail for that address. Then it hangs up.

There are three useful outcomes:

• Verified (valid): the server confirmed the mailbox.
• Accept-all (catch-all): the server says yes to every address, so the check proves nothing. Treat it as a maybe, never a yes.
• Invalid: the mailbox doesn't exist. Never send.

Catch-all is common among small businesses. In Hunter's published sample, 38% of domains were accept-all, and accept-all addresses bounced 27% of the time in its test, against 1% for valid ones (Hunter). If a tool lumps catch-all into "valid", your bounce rate will tell you. Our catch-all guide covers when they're worth sending to.

How do I evaluate a Google Maps scraper? (checklist)#

Run the same test on every tool you shortlist: one trade, one mid-size city, and your real area. Then check each item below.

• Coverage: how many unique businesses did it find for a whole city, compared with one manual Maps search?
• Area precision: how many rows are outside the area you asked for? Are you charged for them?
• Trade precision: how many rows are the wrong trade (the hardware store in your plumber list)? Charged?
• Deduplication: does it dedupe on place ID, across searches and across months?
• Email source: does each email come with the page it was found on, and is it on the business's own domain?
• Verification: are emails graded Verified / Accept-all / Invalid, or is everything "valid"?
• Billing unit: per row returned, per unique business, per email, or per month? Are duplicates and re-runs billed again?
• Free preview: can you see a sample before paying?
• Budget cap: can you stop a run at a lead count or spend limit?
• Where it runs: on your browser and IP, or server-side?
• Exports: CSV, XLSX, Google Sheets, a push to your sequencer or CRM, an API?
• Suppression: can you keep a do-not-contact list that's applied to every export?
• Terms: does the vendor have an acceptable-use policy and an opt-out for businesses?

The first three items are the ones most comparisons skip, and they decide how much of what you pay for you can use.

How much does a Google Maps scraper cost?#

Prices fall into three models: per row (or per event), per month for a fixed number of records, and per unique business or lead. As of October 2026, list prices look like this.

Sources: each vendor's pricing page, collected in the Sources list. Prices change, so check before you buy.

Worked example: 6,000 dentists across a metro#

Say a metro has about 6,000 dental businesses and you want all of them, with emails. Here are the assumptions, so you can swap in your own:

• To find 6,000 unique businesses by tiling, a scraper returns about 15,000 raw rows: the same business shows up in neighboring tiles and keyword variants, and some rows fall outside the area or are the wrong trade.
• About 80% of the 6,000 have a website: 4,800 domains.
• About half of those yield an email: roughly 2,600 addresses to verify.

Per-row pricing (Outscraper rates):

• Maps rows: (15,000 − 500 free) × $3 / 1,000 = $43.50
• Emails & contacts: (4,800 − 500 free) × $3 / 1,000 = $12.90, if you dedupe domains yourself first
• Verification: (2,600 − 25 free) × $3 / 1,000 = $7.73
• Total: about $64, plus your time to dedupe, filter out-of-area rows and match emails back to businesses. Run it again next month and you pay again for the same rows.

Monthly-records pricing: 15,000 rows fits inside a 20,000-record plan at $19. But check whether duplicates and out-of-area rows count against the allowance, and what emails and verification cost on top.

Per-business pricing (Leadraft): 6,000 unique, in-area, on-topic businesses use 6,000 business credits, which fit in Starter. Up to 2,600 checked emails need the Growth plan ($49 a month, 5,000 checked-email credits). Out-of-area and wrong-trade rows aren't charged, and the same business is never charged twice, so next month's re-run only costs the new businesses.

For a single one-off pull, the per-row route can be about the same price or cheaper, if you're happy to do the cleanup. The per-business model gets cheaper the more often you go back to the same market. Our lead list calculator runs this arithmetic with your numbers.

Is using a Google Maps scraper legal?#

Google's terms prohibit it. The Google Maps Platform terms say customers will not "export, extract, or otherwise scrape Google Maps Content", and the Google Maps end-user terms bar mass downloading and using Maps to create business listings databases or mailing lists for a substitute service. That makes it a contract issue first. Whether it's unlawful depends on your country, whether you collect personal data, and how you contact people.

We wrote a full, sourced answer: is scraping Google Maps legal?. If you'll be sending email, read our agency cold-email checklist too, and get legal advice for your situation.

Which Google Maps scraper should I choose?#

For local business leads you plan to email, choose Leadraft. This is what it does in the situations people usually bring to this question.

If you want the step-by-step methods, start with how to scrape Google Maps. If you're weighing the official API, see Places API vs scrapers vs lead tools. And if you're comparing specific vendors, our comparison pages set Leadraft's prices and features next to each one, with sources. For the 6,000-dentist job above, Leadraft comes to $49 a month on Growth, with every email checked and no out-of-area rows billed.

FAQ#

What is a Google Maps scraper?#

A tool that collects business listings from Google Maps (name, category, address, phone, website, rating, review count, hours, coordinates and place ID) and saves them as rows in a spreadsheet or database. Some also visit each business's website to find email addresses and check them.

Does a Google Maps scraper get email addresses?#

Not from Google Maps itself. Listings and the official Places API have no email field. Tools that offer emails visit the business's own website and look for addresses there, then ideally verify them against the mail server.

How many results can a Google Maps scraper get from one search?#

One search in the Google Maps interface stops at about 120 results, and the official Places API Text Search returns at most 60. To get more, a tool has to split the area into smaller tiles and run many searches, then remove duplicates.

How much does a Google Maps scraper cost?#

As of October 2026, per-row tools charge roughly $1.50 to $3 per 1,000 rows, subscriptions run about $19 to $499 a month for a fixed number of records, and email finding and verification are often extra. What matters is the cost per usable, in-area lead with a checked email, not the price per row.

Is it legal to use a Google Maps scraper?#

Google's terms prohibit scraping Google Maps and using it to build mailing or telemarketing lists, so it is a contract issue first. Whether it is unlawful depends on your country, the data and how you use it. Read our full guide and get legal advice for your situation.

What is the best Google Maps scraper?#

For sendable leads inside a specific area, Leadraft (we make it). It tiles past the result cap, keeps businesses inside your area and trade, finds emails on each business's own website, checks every one against the mail server and charges once per business. Its Starter plan is $19 a month for 25,000 businesses and 1,000 checked emails. Raw-data tools and extensions return listing rows and leave emails and verification to you.

Sources#

1. Google for Developers, Place data fields (New) (no email or social fields), seen October 31, 2026.
2. Google for Developers, Text Search (New): "a maximum of 60 results across all pages", seen October 31, 2026.
3. Apify, Google Places API limits (Maps interface shows "only about 120 listings per search"), September 23, 2025.
4. Google Business Profile Help, Create a bulk upload spreadsheet ("up to 9 additional categories").
5. Circleboom, Complete list of Google Business Profile categories (4,102 categories as of February 17, 2026; third-party count).
6. IETF, RFC 5321: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol.
7. Hunter, Accept-all (catch-all) email verification guide.
8. Outscraper, Pricing, seen October 31, 2026.
9. Apify, Google Maps Scraper actor, seen October 31, 2026.
10. Bright Data, Google Maps scraper, seen October 31, 2026.
11. G Maps Extractor, Pricing, seen October 31, 2026.
12. Scrap.io, Pricing, seen October 31, 2026.
13. Google, Google Maps Platform Terms of Service, §3.2.3, and Google Maps End User Additional Terms of Service (last modified January 27, 2026).
14. Leadraft, Coverage methodology (Portland run: 457 vs 230; one city, one keyword) and Pricing.