Google Maps Places Scraper

Google Maps Places Scraper

An Actor built with PlaywrightCrawler that scrapes place listings from Google Maps search results.

For each entry in keywords (combined with the single location, e.g. keyword "restaurants" + location "Tallinn, Estonia" → search "restaurants in Tallinn, Estonia"), it opens the Google Maps search results, scrolls the results feed to collect up to maxCrawledPlacesPerSearch places, then visits each place's page to extract:

• title, category, rating
• address, phone, website, plusCode
• coordinates (latitude/longitude) and placeUrl

Reviews are not scraped. Google Maps only shows review content to signed-in sessions ("You're seeing a limited view of Google Maps — Sign in to get the most out of Google Maps"), and automating a Google account login is against Google's Terms of Service and out of scope for this Actor. If you need review data, the officially supported route is the paid Google Places API (Place Details returns up to 5 reviews per place).

This Actor runs without Apify Proxy or any paid API — just a direct connection, so it's free to run.

Reliability

Google Maps' page markup and anti-bot behavior aren't under our control, so the Actor is built to fail loudly and specifically rather than silently:

• Blocked requests: if Google redirects a request to its /sorry/ interstitial (its standard anti-automation page), the request throws and Crawlee retries it with a fresh session - this is usually transient.
• Layout changes: if the results feed (div[role="feed"]) or a place's <h1> doesn't show up, that's treated as a hard failure and retried too, rather than being logged and silently skipped - a missing <h1> in particular is a strong signal something broke, since every place page we've seen has one.
• Slow/missing optional fields: category, address, phone, website, and plus code lookups each use a 5s timeout instead of Playwright's 30s default. These fields are legitimately absent on some places, and waiting 30s per missing field was blowing through the crawler's request-handler timeout and burning retries on pages that had, in fact, loaded fine.
• End-of-run reporting: after the crawl finishes, the Actor checks its own results. If zero places were scraped and at least one search or place page failed after retries, it calls Actor.fail() with a specific message instead of exiting as if it succeeded with an empty dataset - so a real breakage (blocked, or Google changed its markup) is visible as a failed run rather than a quietly empty one. A partial run (some places scraped, some pages failed) exits successfully with a status message noting the failure count.

Monetization (pay-per-event)

The Actor charges one place-scraped event (via Actor.pushData(item, 'place-scraped') in src/routes.ts) for every place it successfully pushes to the dataset. If the caller's spending limit is reached, the charge is skipped, no unpaid item is pushed, and the run stops gracefully.

Pricing itself isn't set in code — it's configured in Apify Console → your Actor → Monetization after publishing:

1. Select the Pay per event pricing model (the rental model is being retired by Apify in 2026, so this is the only model worth setting up for a new Actor).
2. Add the event place-scraped with a title/description and a price per event (e.g. $0.01–0.03 per place, based on your target margin over compute cost).
3. Leave the synthetic apify-actor-start event at its default price — it's charged automatically per run and doesn't need code changes.

Test monetization locally

$ACTOR_TEST_PAY_PER_EVENT=true ACTOR_USE_CHARGING_LOG_DATASET=true npm run start:dev

This simulates PPE charging (all events default to $1 locally, since real pricing lives on the platform) and writes every charge to the charging_log dataset under storage/datasets/charging_log/, so you can verify exactly what would have been billed.

FAQ and disclaimer

Is this an official Google product? No. This Actor is an independent, unofficial tool built with Crawlee and Playwright to read publicly visible Google Maps search results. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Google, and "Google Maps" is used here only to describe the target website.

Is scraping Google Maps legal? This Actor only extracts data that's publicly visible on Google Maps search and place pages, without logging in or bypassing any access control. That said, scraping is subject to Google's Terms of Service, and you're responsible for checking those terms — along with any applicable laws in your jurisdiction (e.g. around personal data) — apply to your intended use before running it, especially for commercial purposes.

Why are some fields empty? Category, address, phone, website, and plus code are only scraped when Google Maps actually shows them for a given place - many listings legitimately don't have all of these (see Reliability).

Found a bug or have a feature request? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab in Apify Console, or on the GitHub repository.

Resources

If you're looking for examples or want to learn more visit:

• Crawlee + Apify Platform guide
• Documentation and examples
• Node.js tutorials in Academy
• Scraping single-page applications with Playwright
• How to scale Puppeteer and Playwright
• Integration with Zapier, Make, GitHub, Google Drive and other apps
• Video guide on getting scraped data using Apify API
• A short guide on how to build web scrapers using code templates:

Getting started

For complete information see this article. To run the Actor use the following command:

$apify run

Deploy to Apify

Connect Git repository to Apify

If you've created a Git repository for the project, you can easily connect to Apify:

1. Go to Actor creation page
2. Click on Link Git Repository button

Push project on your local machine to Apify

You can also deploy the project on your local machine to Apify without the need for the Git repository.

1. Log in to Apify. You will need to provide your Apify API Token to complete this action.

   $apify login
   

2. Deploy your Actor. This command will deploy and build the Actor on the Apify Platform. You can find your newly created Actor under Actors -> My Actors.

   $apify push
   

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