Every Google Maps Data Field Explained (2026 Reference)

A Google Maps business pin contains roughly 20 useful fields that any modern scraper can extract. This is the reference: every field, what it means, a sample value, how often it's populated, and the most common gotchas. Bookmark this page if you're integrating scraped Maps data into a CRM or building a directory.

The complete field reference

That's the canonical set. Some scrapers include extras like photos[], popular_times, reviews_sample[], and attributes (e.g. "wheelchair accessible," "takeout available," "vegetarian options"). Coverage on those extras is more variable and they roughly double the per-record extraction time, which is why most managed scrapers leave them as opt-in fields rather than defaults.

Key field gotchas

phone

Phone numbers are usually present but the format varies by country. A robust scraper normalizes them to E.164 (+CC RR NNNN NNNN). If you're feeding the data into a dialer or SMS tool, always normalize phone numbers yourself before using them — don't trust whatever format the scraper happens to output, and especially don't trust raw scraped phone numbers for international SMS (you'll burn delivery credit).

website

The website field is the URL the business has registered on Google Maps. A few traps:

• Tracker links. Some businesses register a tracker URL like https://l.facebook.com/?u=… or a business.google.com redirect. A good scraper resolves these to the final destination.
• http vs https. Old listings often have http:// URLs. Don't blindly trust them — try the https:// version first.
• Affiliate / aggregator pages. Restaurants sometimes link their TripAdvisor or Yelp page instead of their own site. Email extraction from those is useless because they're not the business's own domain.

email

Email is the lowest-coverage field for two reasons: (1) not every business has a website, and (2) not every website has a discoverable email. See the email extraction guide for the full mechanics.

When the scraper does find an email, it may find multiple. Most managed scrapers return either the highest-confidence one (an email on the business's own domain, prefer non-gmail.com addresses) or all of them as a comma-separated list. Check how your specific scraper handles this.

category

Google Maps assigns each business a primary category from a controlled vocabulary of around 4,000 entries. The primary category is reliable but coarse — Restaurant covers thousands of cuisines. Use the secondary_categories field for finer-grained filtering when it's populated.

The category vocabulary is Google's, not yours, so if you're filtering programmatically you need to know the exact strings Google uses. "Italian restaurant" and "Italian Restaurant" are the same in Google's data; "Pizza place" and "Pizzeria" are different categories.

rating and reviews_count

Always look at both together. A rating of 4.9 with only 3 reviews is meaningless. A rating of 4.2 with 1,847 reviews is a statistically reliable signal. A common quality filter is reviews_count >= 20 AND rating >= 4.0.

Note that ratings are a snapshot at the time of scrape. They drift slowly. If you re-scrape the same city six months later, expect a few percent of ratings to have moved.

opening_hours

Hours come back as a structured weekly schedule. A few edge cases:

• 24/7 businesses: Represented as "Open 24 hours" for each day.
• Closed days: Represented as "Closed" — not missing data.
• Seasonal businesses: Google Maps doesn't model "summer hours" vs "winter hours" — you get whatever is currently posted.
• Special hours (holidays): Some scrapers capture these in a separate special_hours array, most don't.

permanently_closed and temporarily_closed

Always filter on these flags before using the data. A business marked permanently_closed: true is gone — don't email or call it. temporarily_closed: true is usually a renovation or seasonal pause; the business will likely reopen.

place_id

The place_id is Google's stable internal identifier for the business. It does not change when the business changes its name, address, or phone. Use it as your primary key when de-duplicating between scrapes. Names and addresses can collide; place IDs cannot.

plus_code

Plus codes are Google's open-source alternative to street addresses, useful for businesses in informal settlements or rural areas without conventional addresses. Most scrapers include them but most users ignore them — they're really only useful for routing and mapping work, not for sales outreach.

What's not in a Google Maps scrape

A few things people often expect but don't get:

• Owner name or contact person. Google Maps doesn't expose owner identity, only the business itself.
• Number of employees. Not on Google Maps. Use a B2B database (LinkedIn, ZoomInfo) for firmographics.
• Revenue. Same — not Google Maps data.
• Social media handles. Not directly. Some scrapers parse them out of the linked website during email extraction, but coverage is low.
• VAT / tax IDs. Not on Maps. In some countries (Romania, Italy) you can cross-reference scraped business names against a public VAT registry.

How g-maps-scraper.com handles the fields

Every search returns the full canonical set above. Email extraction is included, not a paid add-on. Phone numbers are returned in their original format — we do not normalize them, on the principle that you should explicitly normalize before any downstream system uses them.

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