Google Maps Limitations: What You Need to Know About Data Collection

Google Maps is an essential tool for finding local businesses, but it comes with several limitations that aren’t immediately obvious to most users. These restrictions can significantly impact how businesses are discovered and how data can be collected from the platform.

When searching for specific businesses on Google Maps, such as Korean restaurants, you might notice the results include similar but not exact matches. This occurs because Google Maps classifies businesses using both primary and secondary categories. While a restaurant might not have ‘Korean’ as its primary category, it could still appear in your search results if ‘Korean’ is listed among its secondary categories.

Another significant limitation involves contact information. While Google Maps readily displays phone numbers and websites for businesses, it doesn’t provide direct access to email addresses. For those needing to collect email information, there’s a workaround: if the business has included its website on its Google Maps listing, you can develop a crawler or scraper to visit these websites and extract additional contact details not available on the Maps platform.

Perhaps the most restrictive limitation is Google’s result cap. No matter how broad your search parameters or how many potential matches exist in an area, Google Maps will only display a maximum of 120 results per query. This limit has been independently verified and remains consistent regardless of search terms or geographic area.

For businesses and marketers looking to gather comprehensive data, understanding these limitations is crucial for developing effective strategies that work within Google’s constraints while maximizing data collection potential.