Google Maps New Business Monitor

Google Maps new business monitor that watches any area on a schedule and returns only the NEW businesses that appeared since the last run — with name, address, phone, website, and Google Maps link. One-shot scrapers give you the same 500 places every week; this monitor gives you the diff, so you contact a new business before anyone else does.

Features

• Diff, not dump: the first run saves a baseline of the area; every following run outputs only businesses that were not there before.
• Any category, any area: watch "restaurant" in Lyon, "dentist" in Brooklyn, "plumber" in Berlin — plain Google Maps search terms.
• Full contact record per new business: name, category, address, phone, website, rating, review count, coordinates, Google Maps URL.
• Schedule-ready: designed for weekly or daily scheduled runs; state is persisted between runs automatically.
• No false positives on flaky results: a business that temporarily drops out of Google Maps results is remembered and never re-flagged as "new".
• Runs with defaults: the prefilled input works without any configuration.

Use cases

• Local SEO & web agencies: new businesses need a website, Google Business Profile setup, and reviews — reach them in week one.
• B2B suppliers & wholesalers: a new restaurant needs a food supplier, POS system, and insurance the day it opens.
• Insurance & banking prospecting: new commercial openings are the highest-intent moment for business services.
• Market intelligence: track how fast a competitor category grows in a target zone.

Input / Output

Input (all defaults work out of the box):

{
  "searchTerms": ["restaurant"],
  "location": "Lyon, France",
  "maxPlacesPerSearch": 100
}

Output — one dataset item per new business:

{
  "placeId": "ChIJ...",
  "name": "Café Nouveau",
  "category": "Coffee shop",
  "address": "21 Rue Paul Bert, 69003 Lyon",
  "phone": "+33 4 78 00 00 09",
  "website": "https://cafenouveau.example",
  "googleMapsUrl": "https://www.google.com/maps/place/?q=place_id:ChIJ...",
  "totalScore": 5.0,
  "reviewsCount": 4,
  "firstDetectedAt": "2026-07-06T12:00:00.000Z",
  "isNewSinceLastRun": true
}

The first run pushes the area baseline (items flagged isBaseline: true; disable with includeBaselineInOutput: false). Every later run pushes only new businesses. A SUMMARY record in the key-value store reports counts for each run.

Pricing

Pay per event: you are charged a small fee per dataset item (new business detected), plus the underlying Google Maps scraping cost. Under the hood this Actor runs the standard Google Maps Scraper (compass/crawler-google-places, charged to your account at its own pay-per-event rate, ~$4 per 1,000 places scanned) and then computes the diff. A weekly monitor of 100 places costs roughly $0.40/run in scanning plus the per-result fee only when new businesses actually appear.

FAQ

How does it detect "new" businesses? Each run scans the area and compares Google placeIds against the saved baseline in a persistent key-value store. Anything not seen before is reported with firstDetectedAt.

Does "new" mean newly opened? It means newly listed on Google Maps in that area's search results — for prospecting purposes this is the moment that matters: it is when the business becomes reachable.

Why do I sometimes see an established business reported as new? If maxPlacesPerSearch is lower than the real number of places in the area, Google Maps returns a different sample each run. The built-in maxReviewsForNew filter (default 25 reviews) removes these false positives: a place with hundreds of reviews that "appears" is sampling noise, not a new opening. For exhaustive coverage, set maxPlacesPerSearch above the area's total place count.

How do I reset a monitor? Set a new monitorId (or change search terms/location — each combination keeps its own baseline).

Can I watch several areas? Yes — create one scheduled task per area, or one task with up to 10 search terms for the same area.

Is scraping Google Maps data legal? The Actor only collects public business listing data (no personal data) via the standard Apify Google Maps Scraper. You are responsible for how you use the extracted data.