Google Maps holds a remarkably complete directory of local businesses, maintained by the businesses themselves because their customers depend on it. Getting that into a spreadsheet is the awkward part.
What a listing actually exposes
Every Google Maps business listing carries a predictable set of fields: name, category, full address, phone number, website URL, star rating, review count, opening hours, photos, and a coordinate pair. Some also carry a description and a year established.
Note what is not there: there is no email field on a Google Business Profile. None. If a tool claims to read an email address off a Maps listing, it is doing something else — usually following the website link and reading the contact page.
Three ways to get the data out
*By hand.* Open a listing, copy each field, paste into a sheet, repeat. Around a minute per business once you account for the fields that need a second click. Fine for ten businesses, genuinely painful at a hundred, and error-prone in a way you will not notice until you are halfway through outreach.
*The Google Places API.* Official, documented, and the right answer if you are building software. You get a stable schema and a licence to use the data in a product. You also get per-request pricing, a developer integration, and terms that restrict what you may store and display. It is not designed for "give me a spreadsheet of roofers in Detroit".
*A browser extension.* Reads the listings already rendered on the page you are looking at and writes them out as rows. No API key, no integration work, no per-request cost. The trade-off is that you are working with what Maps chooses to show, and you are responsible for how you use what you collect.
The step that most people skip
Extraction gets you a list. It does not get you a list worth working.
The useful move is the pass that comes after: visiting each business to add the things the listing does not carry — a public email where one is published, an owner name where it is stated, social profiles, what the website is built on, how many reviews went unanswered. That is what turns 400 rows into a ranked list where the top thirty are worth a call.
Where it stops working
Be realistic about the limits. Not every business has a website, and a business with no website usually has no discoverable email either — which is inconvenient, because those are often exactly the businesses an agency most wants to reach. Enrichment is best-effort, and any tool promising a contact for every listing is overselling.
A closed business can also linger on Maps for months. The data is fresher than a purchased list, but it is not perfect.
Getting started
The [Google Maps extractor](/google-maps-extractor) page lists every field GMapsScout captures and the four export formats. The [step-by-step tutorial](/tutorial) walks through a first extraction end to end.