What Maps Data does and who it is for
Maps Data sits in front of Google Maps and turns it into a structured REST API. Rather than parsing HTML yourself or managing headless browsers, you call a GET endpoint and receive business details, review text, star ratings, photo URLs, and geo coordinates in a consistent format. The API is maintained by a solo developer (reachable on Telegram @AlexanderVikhorev or at [email protected]), which is worth factoring into reliability expectations, though the current success rate of 99% and nearly 6,500 active subscribers suggest a stable track record.
The primary audience is developers building local-search features, lead-generation tools, reputation monitoring dashboards, or any application that needs a steady feed of real-world business data without a direct Google Maps Platform contract.
Endpoint walkthrough
Maps Data exposes eight endpoints, all using GET requests.
Search and discovery
GET /searchmaps.php — Search is the main entry point for keyword-driven queries. You pass a search term and get back a list of matching businesses with their metadata. Optional parameters added in September 2023 give you control over language (lang), country, request limit, and geographic coordinates (longitude and latitude), so you can anchor results to a specific location without knowing a business ID upfront.
GET /nearby.php — Search Nearby works similarly but is optimized for proximity-based queries — useful when you have a coordinate pair and want businesses within a radius rather than a keyword match across a city.
Business detail
GET /place.php — Place info takes a business_id and returns the full detail record for that place: address, hours, phone, website, and whatever structured metadata Google exposes. This is the endpoint you call after getting a list of IDs from the search endpoints.
Reviews
GET /reviews.php — Place reviews returns all available reviews for a given business_id. Because Google Maps reviews are paginated and scraper-dependent, the depth of results will vary by business, but the endpoint abstracts away that complexity.
GET /review.php — Single review returns information about one specific review by its identifier, useful when you want to poll for updates to a known review rather than re-fetching the full list.
Photos
GET /photos.php — Place photos retrieves all photos associated with a business_id. This can feed image galleries in local-search UIs or power image-based content pipelines.
Geocoding
GET /geocoding.php — Geocoding converts a free-text address query into coordinates. This is forward geocoding — you send a place name or address string and receive latitude/longitude.
GET /whatishere.php — What is here? is the reverse: you provide coordinates and get back an address and a list of nearby businesses at that point. Both geocoding endpoints were added in September 2023, rounding out the API from a pure business-search tool to one that handles coordinate workflows end to end.
Pricing breakdown
The four tiers scale aggressively in request volume while keeping per-request cost low at higher volumes.
| Plan | Monthly price | Included requests | Overage per request |
|---|---|---|---|
| BASIC | $0 | 1,000 | — |
| PRO | $3 | 30,000 | $0.0010 |
| ULTRA | $19 | 300,000 | $0.0009 |
| MEGA | $100 | 3,000,000 | $0.0001 |
The free BASIC tier gives you 1,000 requests per month with no overage, making it practical for prototyping or low-frequency hobby projects. At $3/month, PRO is a negligible cost for most production use cases that stay under 30,000 monthly calls — that works out to roughly 1,000 requests per day.
For high-volume applications — aggregators, large-scale lead tools, or multi-tenant SaaS products — ULTRA and MEGA both include significant overage options, with MEGA's overage rate of $0.0001 per request being extremely low. At 3 million included requests, MEGA supports roughly 100,000 calls per day within the flat fee.
Practical use cases
- Local lead generation: Search by keyword and location, retrieve full place details, and pipe results into a CRM or outreach tool.
- Review monitoring: Poll
/reviews.phpon a schedule for a set of competitor or clientbusiness_ids to track rating trends and new review text. - Store locator: Combine the Search and Place info endpoints to power an in-app location finder without a direct Maps Platform dependency.
- Geo enrichment: Use the geocoding endpoints to convert addresses in a dataset to coordinates, or snap coordinates to business names for analytics purposes.
- Content pipelines: Pull photos from
/photos.phpto populate image assets for business directory pages.
Limitations and things to check before integrating
Latency is the most significant caveat. The average response time is 5,348 ms — over five seconds. This rules out Maps Data for any synchronous, user-facing request where low latency matters. The appropriate pattern is to call the API asynchronously, cache results aggressively, and treat it as a data-enrichment or background-job tool rather than a real-time lookup service.
Data freshness and completeness depend on what Google currently exposes and on scraper reliability. Unlike a first-party API, there is no SLA guarantee on data structure changes; if Google alters its page structure, endpoint responses may shift until the scraper is updated. The active changelog and recent feature additions are positive signs that the developer is responsive to changes, but this is inherent risk with any scraper-based product.
Solo maintainer risk. This API is run by a single developer. That means faster, more direct communication for support, but also a single point of failure for maintenance. The 99% success rate is reassuring, but enterprises requiring formal uptime SLAs should weigh this carefully.
BASIC tier limitations. 1,000 requests per month averages to about 33 per day — enough to evaluate the API and build a small demo, but insufficient for any sustained production workload. Realistic production usage will likely start at PRO.
Getting started
The playground is available at https://scraper.tech/panel/playground/maps/, where you can test endpoints before subscribing. Begin with the Search endpoint to confirm response shape and field names match what your application needs. Use a business_id from those results to test Place info and Reviews. Given the latency profile, build your integration around background processing from the start — do not design a user flow that blocks on a Maps Data call in the critical path.
