Google Maps Listing Monitor - Name, Phone, Hours, Website & Status Change Alerts

Know the day a Google Maps business listing changes. Give it your locations (or a competitor's), run it on a schedule, and every run tells you what changed, field by field: name, address, phone, website, category, opening hours (day by day), temporarily or permanently closed, pin location, and optionally rating and review count.

Built for local-SEO agencies and multi-location brands: a wrong phone number or a new "permanently closed" flag that nobody noticed costs calls and rankings.

How it works

1. First run: each listing is read and stored as a baseline (status: "FIRST_RUN", nothing is reported as changed).
2. Every later run: the listing is read again and compared with the baseline. Differences are reported as status: "CHANGED" with a fieldChanges list and a one-line changeSummary; unchanged listings are UNCHANGED.
3. Optionally a webhook (Slack, Discord, Zapier, Make) is called with the changes.

Comparison uses normalised values, so formatting noise is not a change: http vs https, www, a trailing slash, phone punctuation, reordered categories, the thin spaces Google puts in opening hours.

Input

{
  "places": [
    "https://www.google.com/maps/place/?q=place_id:ChIJN1t_tDeuEmsRUsoyG83frY4",
    "ChIJLU7jZClu5kcR4PcOOO6p3I0",
    "https://maps.app.goo.gl/abc123",
    { "placeUrl": "https://www.google.com/maps/place/Eiffel+Tower/@48.85,2.29,17z", "label": "paris-landmark" },
    "Blue Bottle Coffee Hayes Valley San Francisco"
  ],
  "onlyChanges": true,
  "webhookUrl": "https://hooks.slack.com/services/..."
}

places accepts Google Maps URLs (including short links), place IDs (ChIJ...), search text, or objects with a label that becomes the stable key for that location. An empty input {} checks one sample listing (Google Sydney).

Field	What it does
provider	apify: reads listings with a Maps scraper Actor, all places in one run, billed to your own Apify account. places: Google's official Places API (New) with your own key.
watchFields	Restrict what counts as a change (default: everything except rating and review count).
criticalFields	Fields flagged critical: true when they change (default: address, phone, website, title, closed flags).
ignoreReviewCount	On by default: rating and reviews are shown but never alert. Turn off to alert on rating moves and on review-count moves of at least minReviewCountChange.
onlyChanges	Output only listings that changed or keep failing. Recommended for many locations.
alertOnErrorAfter	Flags a listing (brokenTarget) after N failures in a row, often a removed or merged listing.
resetBaseline	Forget stored data and start fresh.
stateStoreName	Use a different name per client to keep baselines apart.
webhookUrl	POSTs { text, content, summary, changes[] }, compatible with Slack and Discord incoming webhooks.

Output (one row per listing)

{
  "type": "listing",
  "key": "ChIJN1t_tDeuEmsRUsoyG83frY4",
  "status": "CHANGED",
  "changed": true,
  "critical": true,
  "changeCount": 2,
  "changeSummary": "phone: +61 2 9374 4000 -> +61 2 9374 4001; hours: Mon 8:30 AM to 5:30 PM -> 9 AM to 5:30 PM",
  "name": "Google Sydney - Pirrama Road",
  "address": "Ground Floor/48 Pirrama Rd, Pyrmont NSW 2009, Australia",
  "phone": "+61 2 9374 4001",
  "website": "http://google.com/",
  "businessStatus": "OPERATIONAL",
  "rating": 4.1,
  "reviewsCount": 1221,
  "fieldChanges": [
    { "field": "phone", "from": "+61 2 9374 4000", "to": "+61 2 9374 4001", "critical": true },
    { "field": "openingHours", "critical": false, "days": [ { "day": "Monday", "from": "8:30 AM to 5:30 PM", "to": "9 AM to 5:30 PM" } ] }
  ],
  "listing": { "title": "...", "categories": ["Corporate office", "Software company"], "openingHours": [ { "day": "Monday", "hours": "8:30 AM to 5:30 PM" } ], "location": { "lat": -33.866, "lng": 151.1957 } },
  "firstSeenAt": "2026-10-03T18:16:59.967Z",
  "lastChangedAt": "2026-10-10T06:00:03.120Z",
  "checkedAt": "2026-10-10T06:00:03.120Z"
}

An unchanged listing has the same shape with status: "UNCHANGED", changed: false and fieldChanges: []. The example above is illustrative: the listing data is real, the phone and hours change is made up to show the format.

Billing and cost

• This Actor: listing-checked for every listing that was read, listing-change for every listing that changed. Listings that could not be read are not billed.
• Data source cost (not ours): with provider: apify the Maps scraper Actor runs under your account and is billed by its author, about $0.004 per place at the time of writing, plus a small start cost per run. All places go through one run (batches of 100), so 100 locations is one scraper run, not 100. With provider: places you pay Google per request on your own Google Cloud billing.

Honest limits

• Google Maps cannot be read directly (it is a JavaScript application with bot protection), so a data source is required: the Maps scraper Actor or the Places API. If that Actor changes its output, results can change with it.
• Google Places API source (provider: places): implemented against Google's Places API (New) documentation and checked here with mocked responses only. We could not run it live without a billing-enabled key, so test it with one listing first. It reads place IDs and search text; a bare Maps URL without a place ID cannot be resolved by this source.
• Keep the same data source and language between runs. Switching provider or language changes how names, categories and hours are written and will look like changes.
• Hours are the regular weekly hours. Special or holiday hours are not tracked.
• Opening-hours and category wording comes from the data source as-is.
• A listing that cannot be found any more shows up as an error row (and brokenTarget after N failures); it is not reported as a content change.

FAQ

Can I monitor a competitor? Yes, any public listing works.

How often should I schedule it? Daily is enough for NAP and hours changes; weekly for a quiet portfolio.

Why does a listing say FIRST_RUN again? You changed stateStoreName or the place key/label, or used resetBaseline.

Does it edit my listing? No. It is read-only.