Google Maps Places Scraper

Google Maps Places Scraper

A powerful Apify Actor built with Scrapy and Playwright to scrape detailed information about places from Google Maps. Perfect for gathering business data, competitor research, lead generation, and local market analysis.

Features

• 🗺️ Comprehensive Data Extraction - Scrapes 13+ data points per place including name, rating, reviews, address, phone, website, hours, and more
• 🎯 Flexible Search - Search for any type of business or point of interest in any city
• 🔄 Automatic Scrolling - Intelligently scrolls through Google Maps results to load more places
• 🚀 Playwright Integration - Uses browser automation for reliable scraping of dynamic content
• 📊 Structured Output - Returns clean, validated JSON data ready for analysis
• 🛡️ Proxy Support - Optional proxy configuration to avoid rate limiting
• ⚡ Concurrent Processing - Efficiently scrapes multiple places in parallel

Included Technologies

• Apify SDK for Python - a toolkit for building Apify Actors and scrapers in Python
• Scrapy - a fast high-level web scraping framework for crawling and data extraction
• Playwright - browser automation library for handling JavaScript-heavy sites
• scrapy-playwright - Scrapy integration with Playwright
• Input schema - define and validate Actor input parameters
• Dataset - store structured data in a scalable format

How it works

This Actor uses Scrapy with Playwright to scrape Google Maps places in two phases:

1. Search Phase:

   • Constructs a Google Maps search URL based on your interest and city
   • Loads the search results page using Playwright (for JavaScript rendering)
   • Automatically scrolls through results to load more places
   • Collects all place URLs from the search results

2. Detail Extraction Phase:

   • Visits each place URL individually
   • Extracts comprehensive information using CSS selectors
   • Cleans and validates the data through processing pipelines
   • Saves structured data to the Apify dataset

Data Processing:

• Rating and review counts are parsed from text to numbers
• Phone numbers and addresses are trimmed of extra whitespace
• Google redirect URLs are converted to actual website URLs
• Missing or unavailable fields are set to null for consistency

Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Required	Description
interest	String	Yes	Type of place to search for (e.g., "cafes", "restaurants", "hotels", "gyms")
city	String	Yes	City name to search in (e.g., "New York", "London", "Tokyo")
maxResults	Integer	No	Maximum number of places to scrape (0 = unlimited, default: 50)
proxyConfiguration	Object	No	Proxy settings to avoid rate limiting (recommended for large scrapes)

Output Data

Each scraped place contains the following fields:

{
  "url": "https://www.google.com/maps/place/...",
  "search_query": "cafes in New York",
  "city": "New York",
  "interest": "cafes",
  "name": "Joe's Coffee Shop",
  "rating": 4.5,
  "reviews": 1234,
  "category": "Coffee shop",
  "address": "123 Main St, New York, NY 10001",
  "phone": "(212) 555-0123",
  "website": "https://joescoffee.com",
  "hours": "Open ⋅ Closes 8 PM",
  "plus_code": "P27Q+3V New York"
}

Use Cases

• 📍 Lead Generation - Find potential customers in specific industries and locations
• 🏢 Competitor Research - Analyze competitor locations, ratings, and customer reviews
• 📊 Market Analysis - Understand business density and distribution in different areas
• 📞 Contact Lists - Build databases of business contacts for outreach
• ⭐ Review Analysis - Gather review counts and ratings for market research
• 🗺️ Location Intelligence - Map out business ecosystems in target cities

Resources

• Google Maps Scraping Guide
• Web scraping with Scrapy
• Python tutorials in Academy
• Playwright for Web Scraping
• Integration with Zapier, Make, Google Drive, and others
• Video guide on getting scraped data using Apify API

Getting started

For complete information see this article. In short, you will:

1. Build the Actor
2. Run the Actor

Pull the Actor for local development

If you would like to develop locally, you can pull the existing Actor from Apify console using Apify CLI:

1. Install apify-cli

   Using Homebrew

   $brew install apify-cli
   

   Using NPM

   $npm -g install apify-cli
   

2. Pull the Actor by its unique <ActorId>, which is one of the following:

   • unique name of the Actor to pull (e.g. "apify/hello-world")
   • or ID of the Actor to pull (e.g. "E2jjCZBezvAZnX8Rb")

   You can find both by clicking on the Actor title at the top of the page, which will open a modal containing both Actor unique name and Actor ID.

   This command will copy the Actor into the current directory on your local machine.

   $apify pull <ActorId>
   

Documentation reference

To learn more about Apify and Actors, take a look at the following resources:

• Apify SDK for JavaScript documentation
• Apify SDK for Python documentation
• Apify Platform documentation
• Join our developer community on Discord