Google Places Scraper
If you’re looking for how to scrape data from Google Maps, you’ll come across a lot of options with varying levels of “sketchiness.” Nearly all of the Google Map scraper services will attempt to illegally & automatically access the Google Maps website using your computer and IP address to try and interact with and pick out visual data from the website. These are often found when searching for “web scraping Google Maps,” as they rely on the “web” to unofficially (and poorly) attempt to visually scrape the data.
In contrast, a more general Google Map data scraper, or Google Maps business scraper, will scrape the places and business details from Google Maps without being constrained to the “web” (hence the name “web scraper”). Specifically, our implementation of a Google Maps Scraper uses the Official Google Maps API to perform the data extraction.
This Google Maps extract approach is free & easy to use - in fact Google provides a free $200 worth of usage credits per month to encourage use of its official API! While the concept of using an API may seem complicated, you’ll find the benefits of receiving accurate and legal data far outweigh the small learning curve associated with it, and this page will help to explain how to get started.
How to Scrape Google Maps via API
You’ll specifically want to use the Google Maps Places API, which will allow you to perform free text and location based searches, just as on the official Google Maps website, returning back data about venues, businesses, hours of operation, coordinates, photos, reviews & more.
To use the Places API, you’ll need to get an API Key that the endpionts on this page will require. It’s very easy to get one with your Google account and you’re allowed a free number of API calls per day, simply follow the instructions to Get Your Google Maps API Key.
1. Perform a Search
Once you have an API Key, you’re ready to perform a basic search using the Google Maps Search Results Scraper which allows you to enter in a free text query and coordinates. If you don’t know your coordinates, you can use a website like My Location to get your coordinates to use as an initial test.
Next, just paste in your API key and execute the endpoint to get the search result page:
We will then query the Google Maps Places Search Endpoint on your behalf and parse out the results into downloadable collections.
2. Export Data
We will then query the Google Maps API for you and parse out the results into a downloadable table, where each row will contain a point of interest with formatted address and some other basic information, like ratings, reviews, location, etc…
3. Get Place Details
If you need more information back about each business or place, like address, phone number, opening hours, website and more, than you’ll want to make a place details request to the Google Maps API. You can see the Google Maps Place Details Scraper for this, and simply paste in the place_id for the place you need more information for.
This will then query the Place Details Endpoint on your behalf and extract out the details into CSV files like before.
If this sounds tedious, don’t worry! You can use a workflow to automate this task for you with our service, where you simply paste in a list of Place IDs (one per line), and we automatically scrape the details for you and combine the results into a single CSV file you can download.
Explore More Scraping Options
The rest of this page contains links to other use cases and options you have to scrape data from Google Maps using the official API. Also, check out some of the other unofficial SERP APIs that allow you to scrape data from their database of locations found from Google, which are very reliable and can help collect vast amounts of information from Google Maps as an alternative to the Google Places API.
