Google Maps Competitor Finder

Find and rank local Google Maps competitors by keyword + location. Returns a clean, flat, CSV-friendly competitor row per result with competitor strength scoring, comparison tags, and a market position hint — built for local SEO, agency research, market analysis, and small-business strategy.

V1 deliberately avoids website crawling, email extraction, full review scraping, photos, menus, and AI enrichment so the run stays fast and cheap. You only pay for unique competitor rows that pass your filters and are successfully written to the dataset.

Why this actor

• Competitor-focused — 30 flat fields tuned for local competitor research (rank, rating, review count, contact details, address parts, strength score, tags, market position hint).
• Transparent strength score — rule-based 0–100, no AI. Explained below.
• Market position hint — short rule-based label like Strong established competitor, Emerging well-rated competitor, Offline-heavy competitor.
• Pay-Per-Event — one charge per saved unique competitor row. Duplicates, filtered rows, and failed pushes are not charged.
• No login, no cookies, no sessions — just keyword + location.
• CSV-friendly output — flat structure, no nested objects, drops cleanly into Sheets/Excel/CRMs.

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Quick start — sample inputs

Example 1 — single query

{
  "searchQueries": [
    { "key": "plumbers", "value": "Canberra ACT" }
  ],
  "maxResults": 100,
  "country": "AU",
  "language": "en",
  "websiteFilter": "any",
  "phoneRequired": false,
  "includeOpeningHours": true,
  "includeCoordinates": true,
  "includeCompetitorScore": true,
  "deduplicateResults": true,
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true }
}

Example 2 — multi-query competitor research

{
  "searchQueries": [
    { "key": "electricians", "value": "Sydney NSW" },
    { "key": "dentists",     "value": "Melbourne VIC" },
    { "key": "cafes",        "value": "Brisbane QLD" }
  ],
  "maxResults": 200,
  "country": "AU",
  "language": "en",
  "minRating": 4.0,
  "minReviewCount": 10,
  "websiteFilter": "any",
  "phoneRequired": false,
  "categoryFilter": "",
  "includeOpeningHours": true,
  "includeCoordinates": true,
  "includeCompetitorScore": true,
  "deduplicateResults": true,
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true }
}

The searchQueries field uses Apify's Key/Value form editor — the Key column is the business keyword (e.g. plumbers), the Value column is the location (e.g. Canberra ACT). Add one row per search.

---

Input fields

Field	Type	Required	Default	Purpose
searchQueries	array	Yes	[]	Keyword + location pairs (one search per row).
maxResults	integer	No	100	Per-query cap (1–500).
country	string	No	""	ISO country code (e.g. AU, US).
language	string	No	en	Google Maps UI language.
minRating	integer	No	0	Drop competitors below this star rating.
minReviewCount	integer	No	0	Drop competitors below this review count.
websiteFilter	enum	No	any	any / hasWebsite / missingWebsite.
phoneRequired	boolean	No	false	Keep only competitors with a visible phone.
categoryFilter	string	No	""	Case-insensitive contains match against category.
includeOpeningHours	boolean	No	true	Include opening hours when visible.
includeCoordinates	boolean	No	true	Include latitude/longitude when available.
includeCompetitorScore	boolean	No	true	Compute strength score, label, tags, and market position hint.
deduplicateResults	boolean	No	true	Remove duplicate competitors across queries.
proxyConfiguration	object	No	Apify Proxy	Apify Datacenter proxy / no proxy / custom proxy URLs. Apify Residential is rejected (see Proxy policy below).

---

Output

The dataset has one view: Competitors — a 30-column flat table.

Sample record — Competitors

{
  "search_keyword": "electricians",
  "search_location": "New York, USA",
  "competitor_rank": 1,
  "business_name": "H&A Electrician",
  "category": "Electrician",
  "rating": 4.8,
  "review_count": null,
  "phone": "646) 351-0882",
  "website": "https://www.bestnycelectricianmanhattan.com/",
  "website_domain": "bestnycelectricianmanhattan.com",
  "address": "40 Fulton St",
  "street_address": "40 Fulton St",
  "suburb": "",
  "city": "",
  "state": "",
  "postcode": "",
  "country": "",
  "google_maps_url": "https://www.google.com/maps/place/H%26A+Electrician/data=!4m7!3m6!1s0x89c25a3d39458305:0xf6758912f6af992a!8m2!3d40.707876!4d-74.004745!16s%2Fg%2F1hc3pdw6w!19sChIJBYNFOT1awokRKpmv9hKJdfY",
  "place_id": "0x89c25a3d39458305:0xf6758912f6af992a",
  "latitude": 40.707876,
  "longitude": -74.004745,
  "opening_hours": "",
  "is_open_now": true,
  "has_website": true,
  "has_phone": true,
  "competitor_strength_score": 60,
  "competitor_strength_label": "Established Competitor",
  "competitor_tags": [
    "has_website",
    "has_phone",
    "high_rating",
    "category_found",
    "established_competitor"
  ],
  "market_position_hint": "Established competitor",
  "scraped_at": "2026-05-07T04:37:25.314Z"
}

Output fields (30)

search_keyword, search_location, competitor_rank, business_name, category, rating, review_count, phone, website, website_domain, address, street_address, suburb, city, state, postcode, country, google_maps_url, place_id, latitude, longitude, opening_hours, is_open_now, has_website, has_phone, competitor_strength_score, competitor_strength_label, competitor_tags, market_position_hint, scraped_at.

---

Competitor strength score

Transparent rule-based score (0–100) computed from visible fields — no AI, no external enrichment.

Signal	Points
Has website	+20
Has phone	+15
Rating ≥ 4.5	+20
Rating 4.0–4.49	+10
Review count ≥ 100	+25
Review count 30–99	+15
Review count 10–29	+8
Has full address	+10
Category found	+5
Opening hours found	+5

Score is capped at 100.

Labels

Score	Label
80–100	Strong Competitor
60–79	Established Competitor
40–59	Moderate Competitor
0–39	Weak Competitor

Competitor tags explain the score and surface comparison signals:

has_website / missing_website
has_phone / missing_phone
high_rating / low_rating
many_reviews / few_reviews
complete_address / missing_address
category_found / opening_hours_found
strong_competitor / established_competitor / moderate_competitor / weak_competitor
reputation_strength / reputation_weakness
seo_visible_competitor / weak_digital_presence

Market position hint is a short rule-based interpretation of the score and tags. Examples: Strong established competitor, Emerging well-rated competitor, High-visibility but reputation weakness, Offline-heavy competitor, Weak digital competitor.

---

Pricing

Pay-Per-Event. The actor honors the user-configured per-run spending cap (Apify eventChargeLimitReached) and stops cleanly when reached.

Event	Fires
competitor-result	Once per unique competitor row that passed all filters and was successfully pushed to the dataset.

🚦 Proxy policy

Use Apify Datacenter proxy or no proxy for normal runs — both work reliably for Google Maps search at this actor's conservative concurrency.

Apify Residential proxy is not supported. The actor will fail at startup if apifyProxyGroups includes RESIDENTIAL. Reason: in pay-per-event actors, residential bandwidth (~/GB) is billed to the developer, not the run user, so a single bandwidth-heavy run could exceed the per-result event revenue.

If you genuinely need residential routing, supply your own residential provider via the proxy editor's Custom proxy URLs field — that traffic goes through your provider, not Apify, and is unaffected:

http://user:pass@proxy.iproyal.com:12321
http://user:pass@proxy.brightdata.com:22225
http://user:pass@proxy.oxylabs.io:7777

Not charged for competitor-result:

• Duplicates (de-duplicated by place_id, listing URL, or name+address).
• Rows filtered out by minRating, minReviewCount, websiteFilter, phoneRequired, or categoryFilter.
• Rows missing a business_name.
• Failed dataset pushes.
• Anything after the per-run spending cap is reached.

---

Run summary

After each run, a RUN_SUMMARY entry is written to the key-value store:

{
  "search_queries_total": 3,
  "successful_queries": 3,
  "failed_queries": 0,
  "raw_results_found": 240,
  "results_saved": 187,
  "duplicates_removed": 21,
  "filtered_out": 32,
  "charged_events": 187,
  "blocked_requests": 0,
  "retried_requests": 4,
  "runtime_seconds": 142,
  "scraped_at": "2026-05-06T12:00:00.000Z"
}

charged_events always equals results_saved.

---

Filters

Filter	Effect
minRating	Drop competitors below this star rating (0 disables).
minReviewCount	Drop competitors with fewer reviews (0 disables).
websiteFilter	any / hasWebsite / missingWebsite.
phoneRequired	If true, keep only competitors with a visible phone.
categoryFilter	Case-insensitive contains match against the category.
deduplicateResults	Drop duplicates across queries (recommended ON).

Filters are applied after extraction and before dataset push or event charge.

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Limitations (V1)

• Cards-only extraction: V1 reads each competitor row directly from the search results panel and does not click into individual place detail panels. Phone, website, full opening hours, and place_id only appear when Google surfaces them on the card itself; otherwise these fields are empty/null.
• No website crawling, email extraction, or social link extraction.
• No full review text or sentiment analysis.
• No photos, menus, prices, or popular times.
• No login/cookie/session-based scraping.
• No true distance/radius calculation against a seed business in V1.
• Address parsing into street/suburb/city/state/postcode is best-effort; the full address field is the source of truth.
• Per-query hard cap is 500 results; per-run hard cap is 5,000 results.

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Technical notes

• Stack: Node.js 22 · Apify SDK 3 · Crawlee · Puppeteer.
• Concurrency: min=1, max=3 (conservative to reduce blocking).
• Memory: 1 GB min · 2 GB default · 4 GB max.
• Proxy: Apify Datacenter proxy by default; custom proxy URLs accepted. Apify Residential is rejected at startup (see Proxy policy above).
• Diagnostics: On the first failed render (no feed, or feed but zero cards), the actor saves the page HTML and URL to the key-value store as debug-no-feed-html / debug-zero-cards-html.