Google Maps Popular Times Scraper

Extract the Popular Times histogram for any Google Maps place — the busy-hours bar chart that Google shows on most restaurants, shops, gyms, and tourist attractions. Get hourly busyness percentages for all 7 days of the week, plus the live "current busyness" reading and typical visit duration.

What It Does

Give this actor a Google Maps place URL and it returns:

• Per-day hourly busyness (0–100%) for Monday through Sunday — a full week of data in one request
• Peak hour and peak busyness percentage for each day
• Quietest hour for each day
• Live busyness reading at the moment of scraping (e.g. "As busy as it gets", "A little busy")
• Typical time spent at the place (e.g. "People typically spend 30 min to 1 hour here")
• Business name + Place ID for cross-referencing with the Google Maps API
• Location (lat/lng) and place URL echoed on every record so datasets stay joinable

Use Cases

• Plan field operations and logistics around quietest hours
• Find optimal times to visit popular tourist attractions
• Build foot-traffic dashboards for retail, restaurants, and gyms
• Inform staffing decisions for franchise networks
• Power "when to go" recommendations in travel apps

Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
placeUrl	String	Conditional	Google Maps URL of a single place
placeUrls	Array of strings	Conditional	Multiple places in one run

At least one of placeUrl or placeUrls must be provided.

Example input — single place

{
  "placeUrl": "https://www.google.com/maps/place/McDonald%27s/@40.7577297,-73.9853627,17z/"
}

Example input — batch

{
  "placeUrls": [
    "https://www.google.com/maps/place/Starbucks/@40.7127281,-74.0060152,17z/",
    "https://www.google.com/maps/place/McDonald%27s/@40.7577297,-73.9853627,17z/",
    "https://www.google.com/maps/place/Whole+Foods+Market/@40.7561,-73.9903,17z/"
  ]
}

Output

One record per place:

{
  "businessName": "McDonald's",
  "placeId": "0x89c2597777397641:0x4387a82ee10d3e3b",
  "placeUrl": "https://www.google.com/maps/place/McDonald%27s/...",
  "location": {"lat": 40.7577297, "lng": -73.9853627},
  "liveBusyness": "A little busy",
  "typicalTimeSpent": "People typically spend 15-30 min here",
  "popularTimes": {
    "monday":    [{"hour": 6, "busyness": 12}, {"hour": 7, "busyness": 38}, "..."],
    "tuesday":   [{"hour": 6, "busyness": 14}, "..."],
    "wednesday": [{"hour": 6, "busyness": 11}, "..."],
    "thursday":  [{"hour": 6, "busyness": 13}, "..."],
    "friday":    [{"hour": 6, "busyness": 16}, "..."],
    "saturday":  [{"hour": 7, "busyness": 22}, "..."],
    "sunday":    [{"hour": 7, "busyness": 18}, "..."]
  },
  "peakHours": {
    "monday":    {"hour": 12, "busyness": 89},
    "tuesday":   {"hour": 12, "busyness": 84},
    "wednesday": {"hour": 13, "busyness": 91},
    "thursday":  {"hour": 12, "busyness": 87},
    "friday":    {"hour": 18, "busyness": 96},
    "saturday":  {"hour": 14, "busyness": 78},
    "sunday":    {"hour": 13, "busyness": 71}
  },
  "scrapedAt": "2026-06-16T18:23:11+00:00"
}

Empty / unavailable fields are omitted from the record — no null values appear in the dataset.

Hourly busyness format

Each day in popularTimes is an array of {hour, busyness} pairs:

• hour — 0–23 (local time at the business)
• busyness — integer 0–100 (Google's relative busyness percentage; 100 = peak for that place)

Hours with no data (e.g. while the place is closed) are omitted from the array.

FAQ

Which places have Popular Times data? Restaurants, cafés, retail stores, gyms, grocery stores, and major tourist attractions almost always have it. Small businesses, services without foot traffic, and very new listings often do not.

Why is liveBusyness sometimes missing? Google only shows live data while the place is currently open and has enough recent visits to compute it. When the place is closed or hasn't reached the data threshold, the field is omitted.

How is busyness measured? Google reports it as a percentage of peak for that specific place. 100 means "as busy as this place ever gets". The values are derived from aggregated, anonymised Google location-history data.

Do I need a proxy or cookies? No login required. A proxy is not necessary for typical runs; Google Maps serves Popular Times without restriction from datacenter IPs.

Can I scrape hundreds of places in one run? Yes — pass them as placeUrls. The actor processes places sequentially with a polite delay between requests. For very large batches, split into multiple runs.

Does this scrape the Google Places API? No. It loads the public-facing Google Maps web page (Playwright + Chromium) and extracts the embedded data block, so no API key, no billing, no quota.

Data Source

Public Google Maps web UI (google.com/maps). No Google API key or login is required.

🗺️ Complete Google Maps Scraper Suite

This actor is part of a comprehensive Google Maps data extraction toolkit by crawlerbros. All actors run on the free Apify plan, use no proxy by default, and return clean, structured data.

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