Google Maps Scraping or the Places API: What Data, What Limits?
What a Google Maps listing contains, what the Places API returns, and what Google's terms and the GDPR require, with our figures on 4.8 million listings in France, including about 4 million business locations.
Google Maps scraping extracts data from business listings. According to Scalon's data as of November 2, 2026, France has 4.8 million listings, including about 4 million business locations: 86% of business listings show a phone number, 43% a website, and almost none an email. Google's Places API returns at most 60 results per search.
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Get the list for my marketPublished on November 2, 2026
In this article
- What does a Google Maps scraper do, and what does it return?
- Building a restaurant list from Google Maps: what it contains, what is missing
- Emails from Google Maps: why the listing has none
- Duplicates, closed listings, truncated areas: where the raw list falls short
- The Google Maps API in 2026: at most 60 results per search
- Is Google Maps scraping legal? What Google's terms say
- Scraping and the GDPR: public data is not free data
- From raw file to qualified map: what the row adds
What does a Google Maps scraper do, and what does it return?#
Scraping Google Maps means automatically extracting the public data of business listings (name, address, phone, website) into a spreadsheet. You do it with a dedicated tool: a browser extension, an online service, an API, or a script, often written in Python.
A business location is a site where a company operates: a restaurant, a garage, a bakery. One company can run several. The main use case is sales: listing the businesses of one trade in one area in order to prospect them.
The pool is large: our data counts 4.8 million Google Maps listings in France as of November 2, 2026, including about 4 million business locations. Not all of them are businesses: parking lots, EV charging stations and playgrounds have listings too.
Google Maps scraping gives you listings, not a prospect list. Two limits show why.
The official API returns at most 60 results per search and has no email field. And the CNIL (France's data protection authority) points out that public data is not freely reusable, GDPR included.
Building a restaurant list from Google Maps: what it contains, what is missing#
You sell to restaurants. You type "restaurant" and a postal code into Google Maps. Each result is a listing, and the scraping tool puts each listing on one spreadsheet row, exported as a CSV.
The basic columns are the ones Google Maps displays: name, address, phone, website. Name, address, phone: that is the trio every scraping tool promises. Opening hours and reviews are often added, since they show on the listing.
In our data as of November 2, 2026, 86% of business listings in France show a phone number and 43% a website. More than one open business listing in ten has neither a phone nor a website. Opening hours appear on 68% of these listings. And 23% have no review yet; when a rating exists, it is 4 out of 5 or higher 8 times out of 10.
Chart data
| Field shown | Share of business listings |
|---|---|
| Phone number | 86% |
| Opening hours | 68% |
| Website | 43% |
| Email address | 0% |
Place Details is the Google API that describes a listing. Its documentation, updated on October 30, 2026, gives an idea of the Google Maps data available. It lists the national phone number, the website, the business status, the rating and the number of reviews.
What is missing follows from what a listing is for. It is made for the visitor looking for a place to eat, not for the salesperson preparing a call. The SIREN number (the nine-digit French company ID), the name of the company head or its headcount are not its purpose.
Two other gaps matter to an SDR. First, the email, covered just below. Second, row quality: duplicates, closed listings, incomplete areas.
Emails from Google Maps: why the listing has none#
A Google Maps listing does not carry an email address. The Place Details documentation lists the phone, the website, the status, the rating and the number of reviews, and no email field.
Our data shows it: as of November 2, 2026, almost none has one, 78 listings in France out of 4.8 million, fewer than one in 60,000.
Getting emails from Google Maps therefore takes a detour. The address is found elsewhere, most often from the website the listing points to. A contact page, a legal notice, a footer. That detour requires a website: 43% of business listings show one.
One vendor of these tools describes its method: the tool crawls the business's website to look for emails. It publishes no success rate. A file that advertises "name, address, phone, email" has therefore filled in the listings from another source, and that source matters.
Nor does having the address give you the right to use it without conditions. We come back to this with the GDPR.
Duplicates, closed listings, truncated areas: where the raw list falls short#
A Google Maps data file is a snapshot, taken on the day of the extraction. It is not a database kept up to date in real time. Three flaws show up as soon as you work the list.
Duplicates. The same restaurant comes up in several neighboring searches: "restaurant", "brasserie", two adjacent postal codes. It ends up on several rows, and two salespeople may call it in the same week.
Closed listings. Google keeps an activity status for each listing (the businessStatus field of Place Details). Nothing guarantees it is up to date. A closed business can keep an open listing, and you find out on the phone.
Our data measures it. As of November 2, 2026, Google marks 2.5% of business listings in France as permanently closed. But among the open business listings we tie to a SIRET number (the ID of a business location in France's Sirene business register), 12% carry a number closed in the Sirene register, and in 8 cases out of 10 the closure is more than a year old. The business has closed, moved or changed operator: the row's SIRET number no longer points to the business now operating there.
Truncated areas. A search returns only part of the businesses; on the API side, it is 60 at most. Covering a large area, let alone a whole country, means multiplying searches by city or by postal code. Scaling up, from 1,000 to 10,000 rows, multiplies the duplicates described above.
For restaurants, the limit is reached fast. As of November 2, 2026, 648 postal codes have more than 60 open restaurant listings in our data, and together they hold 57% of the 185,707 restaurant listings. In these postal codes, a "restaurant" search through the API cannot see them all.
Chart data
| Restaurants in the postal code | Postal codes | Restaurant listings | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 to 20 | 4,335 | 34,609 | 19% |
| 21 to 40 | 982 | 28,187 | 15% |
| 41 to 60 | 351 | 17,131 | 9% |
| 61 to 100 | 298 | 22,685 | 12% |
| 101 to 200 | 215 | 29,823 | 16% |
| Over 200 | 135 | 53,272 | 29% |
| Total | 6,316 | 185,707 | 100% |
Tying each row to its company through the SIREN number remains a separate job. That sorting falls to the salesperson when they build their own lists. The qualification time calculator puts a number on what it costs your team.
As of November 2, 2026, our data ties 46% of business listings in France to a SIRET number, and 57% of restaurant listings. The others are not tied yet.
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Get the list for my marketThe Google Maps API in 2026: at most 60 results per search#
The Google Places API is the official route Google offers to query its places. It is used with an API key, tied to a Google Maps Platform account.
The text search of the Google Places API, Text Search (New), returns at most 60 results in total, in pages of 20. The documentation, updated on October 30, 2026, states that this limit may change.
For each place, Place Details exposes the phone, the website, the status, the rating and the number of reviews. No email, just like the listing.
The API answers one query. On its own, it does not deliver a file of 500 restaurants, and going through Google Maps via the API does not exempt you from the terms of use. What you are allowed to keep from this data is written in Google's terms.
The Google Maps API is the official route, but a narrow one.
Is Google Maps scraping legal? What Google's terms say#
Is it legal to scrape Google Maps? The answer has two levels. On one side, what Google writes in its terms. On the other, what data law requires of whoever reuses the list, covered in the next section.
The Google Maps Platform terms currently in force are the version of August 26, 2026.
Even through the API, retention is restricted. The Maps service specific terms, version of October 28, 2026, govern the Places API. They allow keeping latitude and longitude for 30 consecutive days. After that, you must delete them.
Google's general terms of service target automated access that does not respect instructions such as the robots.txt file (the rules read by crawlers). The one on google.com blocks /maps/ but allows /maps/place/ and /maps/search/.
Scraping and the GDPR: public data is not free data#
A Google Maps listing is visible to everyone. Scraping publicly accessible data does not make it free to use for all that.
On reusing such data for sales outreach, the CNIL writes that it is "not freely reusable by any data controller". The page is dated April 30, 2020.
The same page sets a duty to inform. Whoever reuses the data must inform the individuals concerned, in particular of its source. They must do so no later than the first contact.
For email and automated calls, this page requires the consent of the individuals concerned. It covers consumers and internet users, and says nothing about business addresses.
To prospect a professional by email, another CNIL page, on commercial prospecting by email, is more nuanced. Dated June 10, 2026, it says that consent is not always required.
It cites three situations where it is not:
- the address is generic (info@, contact@);
- the professional was informed of how their address would be used and can object free of charge;
- the message is related to their profession.
For an address that identifies a specific person, both of the last two conditions must be met.
These obligations fall on whoever makes the contact. Whether the list comes from a scraper or from a vendor changes nothing. "Is it legal in France?" has no one-word answer.
Three questions help before the first message:
- Where does this address come from?
- Will the person know where you got their contact details?
- Can they object easily?
Need the list for your market? We send it with the contact details available, for the scope you choose.
Get the list for my marketFrom raw file to qualified map: what the row adds#
The flaws of the raw file are what Scalon handles before delivery. We deliver a map of local businesses, qualified one by one.
Each row identifies the business: legal name, address, phone, email, SIREN number, company head, years in business, headcount, and revenue when it is public. It also carries a fit score out of 100, a verdict, and a written reason that says why the business is in your target. On top of that come signals specific to your trade and a match against your CRM.
The method starts with a thirty-minute scoping call, then collection area by area and a human review of borderline cases. Delivery is in CSV, XLSX or by API, with updates included for twelve months.
Provenance is traceable. On request, Scalon says where a piece of information comes from and when it was observed. The details are on the site's data compliance and provenance page.
The scope has clear edges. Businesses, not profiles of people. Data to widen your market, not inbound lead generation.
Sending, sequences and informing the individuals concerned stay on your side.
The Essentiel plan starts at €2,000 excluding VAT per year. It includes twelve months of license, one trade, one area and one update; setup is added in the first year.
To judge for yourself, a free sample of 100 qualified businesses is offered, with no commitment. You can request it from the Scalon page for field sales reps and SDRs.
Method#
The listing figures come from the 4.8 million Google Maps listings located in France in Scalon's data, read on November 2, 2026: latest version of each listing, phone, website, email, status shown by Google, reviews and rating. The shares cover listings whose Google category denotes a business location. The tie to a SIRET number comes from 19,577 listings drawn at random, part of which were read a second time. The rules and limits cited come from other sources: Google's documentation and terms, the CNIL.
Method details and limits
Scope: Google Maps listings with an address in France, including France's overseas territories, present in our data on November 2, 2026 and not removed (4,823,998). This is not the number of Google listings in France, which Google does not publish, but the ones we know.
Business listings: we read each of the 4,186 main Google categories with the Claude Haiku 5.5 model (Anthropic) and classified each one as a business location (company, store, independent professional, nonprofit, public service open to the public) or as a place (parking lot, EV charging station, park, playground, monument, transit stop…). The 3,657 business categories hold 3,687,262 listings; 306,657 listings are places, 227,566 fall in categories that cannot be settled, and 602,513 have no category (of 100 of them drawn at random, 27 are business locations). The business total therefore ranges from 3.85 to 4.17 million depending on how the uncertain categories are classified: about 4 million. Check on 200 listings drawn at random, read one by one: 171 are business locations (85.5%) and, for listings whose category is classified, the reading of the listing matches that of its category 170 times out of 179. Scalon reread 20 of them a second time and found the same answer 20 times.
The shares in the text cover the 3,687,262 listings in business categories. Phone, website: at least one value (3,153,992 and 1,597,307 listings). "Open": listings that Google marks neither permanently closed (93,263) nor temporarily closed, that is 3,587,132; 424,031 of them have neither a phone nor a website. Opening hours: share of the 3,671,295 listings for which we have the full details (2,504,460 with at least one day of hours). Reviews: latest review count and latest rating recorded (3,681,349 listings measured, 858,356 with no review, 2,822,993 rated, average rating 4.47). Email: 78 listings out of the 4,823,998, all categories.
Restaurants: open listings whose main Google category is a type of restaurant ("Restaurant", "Pizza restaurant", "Fast food restaurant"…), counted by postal code. Brasseries or pizzerias filed under another category are not included: this is not the number of restaurants in France.
SIRET: 19,577 listings drawn at random (about 1 in 250), 15,000 of them in business categories. For each, we check whether our data ties it to a location in the Sirene register: 6,855 of the 15,000 business listings (90% confidence interval: 45.0% to 46.4%). Among the 6,693 open business listings tied to a SIRET, 778 have only numbers closed in the register; for 629 of them, the closure is more than a year old. Restaurants: 442 of the 779 restaurant listings in the draw are tied. Tying listings is ongoing work at Scalon: the tied share is the current one. We read 100 of these ties with the same model: 50 at random among tied listings (44 most likely refer to the same business, 6 cannot be settled, none is wrong), 50 among open listings with a closed number (46 the same business, none wrong); Scalon reread 20 of them a second time and found the same answer 20 times. The commands that replay each figure are kept with the article.
Cite the study#
The full citation, with counts
Scalon Observatory, "Google Maps Scraping or the Places API: What Data, What Limits?", November 2, 2026: out of 4.8 million Google Maps listings located in France in Scalon's data, including about 4 million business locations, 86% of business listings show a phone number and 43% a website, and 78 listings an email address; 648 postal codes have more than 60 open restaurant listings; 12% of open business listings tied to a SIRET carry a number closed in the Sirene register (778 out of 6,693). https://scalon.fr/en/blog/google-maps-scraping
Sources#
- Text Search (New), documentation Google Maps Platform, mise à jour le 30 octobre 2026
- Place Details (New), documentation Google Maps Platform, mise à jour le 30 octobre 2026
- Google Maps Platform Terms of Service, version du 26 août 2026
- Google Maps Platform Service Specific Terms, version du 28 octobre 2026
- Conditions d'utilisation de Google, en vigueur depuis le 30 juillet 2026
- Fichier robots.txt de google.com, lu le 2 novembre 2026
- La réutilisation des données publiquement accessibles en ligne à des fins de démarchage commercial, CNIL, 30 avril 2020
- La prospection commerciale par courrier électronique, SMS-MMS et automate d'appel, CNIL, 10 juin 2026
- Article L34-5 du code des postes et des communications électroniques, Légifrance
- Pricing, Scalon
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