Google Maps: build a list of local businesses
Tell Manycrawl what to find and where, and it fills a table with the businesses Google Maps lists there: name, rating, reviews, category, address, phone, website and more. It works in the desktop app.
What you get
Each business is a row with these columns: Name, Rating, Reviews, Category, Address, Phone, Website, Booking link, Hours, Maps URL, Search query and Recorded. Some places have no website or phone number on Google, and those cells stay empty. If a business only lists a reservation link, it goes in Booking link and not in Website.
Start a search
- On the home screen, choose the Google Maps card. You can also find it under Library → Templates.
- Name the table if you like. The name is optional, for example “Dentists in Berlin”.
- Under What to find (category or keyword), type a category or keyword and press Enter. Manycrawl suggests Google’s business categories, or you can type your own. Each one becomes its own search, so three keywords can return up to three times the rows.
- Under Location (city, address, or place), enter where to look, for example “Berlin, Germany”. Leave it blank for one quick search with no area.
- Set the Radius (mi), which is 5 by default, and Max per search, which is 1000 by default. The map labelled Area to scrape shows what will be covered.
- Click Create & run.
Rows appear as they are found. The run bar reads “Google Maps — N found”. The search runs in a hidden window, so you do not see it and can keep using your computer. Only one search runs at a time; if you start a second you see “A search is already running — let it finish first.”
How many results can you get
Google caps a single Maps search at about 120 results. To get past that when you give a location, Manycrawl splits the area into small tiles, searches each one, and removes duplicates by place. A large area can take many tiles, up to 80, so a big radius takes longer. Max per search caps the total for each keyword, and a table never grows past its row limit.
Each new business is one action. Filling in missing details later is free. See how credits and usage limits work.
After the first run
- Scrape more runs the same search again and adds only businesses that are not already in the table.
- Edit search reopens the form and keeps your rows. Use it to add a keyword or change the area.
- Fill missing re-visits places that have a Maps link but no address, or no website, or only a booking link, and fills in what Google has. It asks first: “Fill missing address for N place(s)? This re-visits each slowly (to avoid Google's rate limit), so it can take a few minutes.” You can stop it at any time. This button is only for Google Maps tables.
- Map view shows your businesses as pins on a map. The button changes to Table view to switch back.
Proxy
The default is No proxy (direct). Many proxy addresses cannot load Google Maps, so if a proxied run comes back empty, switch back to no proxy. You can choose a new address per query or a sticky one if you do use a proxy.
If something goes wrong
- A window asks you to solve a check. If Google shows a CAPTCHA or consent wall that Manycrawl cannot clear, the hidden window appears with the title “Manycrawl — solve the check (or sign in) to continue”. Solve it, or sign in to Google, which also makes checks less frequent. Manycrawl waits for up to five minutes and never solves checks for you.
- “Google Maps says it can't find …”. This often means Google distrusts the search window’s saved session. Manycrawl clears that window’s Google data and retries once, and not more than once every ten minutes. If it finds nothing again, you see that the search is genuinely empty.
- Zero results for a search that should have some. Try different wording, a nearby place, or run it again later. Google sometimes stops answering for a while.