Every B2B lead list starts in the same place: Google Maps. Sales teams want the names, ratings, phone numbers and websites of every plumber, dentist or distributor in a target city. The official way to buy that data is the Google Places API, which charges up to $32 per 1,000 searches at its Pro tier. The unofficial way is Google Maps scraping — a vendor industry selling nearly the same records for roughly $0.75 to $3 per 1,000.
Google’s terms prohibit the practice. Courts have mostly declined to stop it. That tension is the story of this market.
Why the Places API cannot serve the lead-generation market
Start with the price list, because it is public. Google charges $32 per 1,000 calls for Text Search and Nearby Search at the Pro tier, after 5,000 free monthly calls. Requesting ratings, phone numbers or opening hours reprices each call at the Enterprise tier: $35 per 1,000. Adding reviews pushes the price to $40. Field-mask billing charges the highest tier any requested field belongs to, so a single review field lifts a call from $32 to $40 per 1,000.
Structure blocks the use case too. A Places API search returns at most 60 results across three pages — a thin slice of any city’s business count. Google’s Maps Platform terms restrict caching, require deleting some content within 30 days, and bar customers from exporting Maps content for use outside Google’s services. A weekly CSV refresh into a sales CRM falls outside that boundary by design.
The gap compounds at scale. TechRecast’s arithmetic, from Google’s published prices: a 10,000-listing pull needs roughly 500 searches plus one details call per place. That lands near $185 to $215 before discounts. A September 2026 vendor benchmark priced the same job at $0.75 to $28.50 across six scraping services.
What US courts have actually said
Three rulings frame this market. In Van Buren v. United States (2021), the Supreme Court narrowed the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act: exceeding a website’s terms of service is not a federal crime. In hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn (2022), the Ninth Circuit held that scraping publicly visible data likely does not violate the CFAA. hiQ itself later lost on breach-of-contract grounds, a detail vendor blogs tend to omit. In Meta v. Bright Data (January 2024), a California court granted summary judgment for logged-off scraping of publicly available content, finding no binding contract with an anonymous visitor.
Read together, the rulings make public-data scraping a contract question rather than a crime. Maps listings are visible without logging in, and scraping vendors build their businesses on that reading. One caveat belongs in bold: no US court has squarely ruled on Google Maps scraping. The extension from LinkedIn and Meta pages to Maps is analysis, not precedent.
What Google’s terms prohibit — and what that is worth
Google’s universal terms, effective 30 July 2026, prohibit automated access to its services. The Maps Additional Terms, last modified 27 January 2026, go further. They prohibit copying content, mass downloading, bulk feeds, and using Maps to build or augment a business-listings database. That last clause describes the scraper industry exactly.
But terms bind only parties who accepted them. Google’s enforcement has run through engineering, not lawsuits: IP blocks, rate limits, CAPTCHAs and, since January 2025, SearchGuard — a JavaScript challenge that checks whether a query comes from a real browser.
The SerpApi case: Google’s legal workaround stumbles
On 19 December 2025, Google sued SerpApi in the Northern District of California. The complaint did not lean on terms of service. It invoked the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions, arguing that SearchGuard is a technological measure controlling access to copyrighted works. Statutory damages run $200 to $2,500 per act, and Google alleges billions of acts. It says SerpApi’s automated requests grew 25,000% in two years, to hundreds of millions per day.
On 20 July 2026, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers granted SerpApi’s motion to dismiss in part, with leave to amend. The order reasoned that Google’s claims fail to the extent SearchGuard controls access to search results that are not copyrighted works. A gate that bars an entire public page is not an access control for the licensed images on it. Google has since filed an amended complaint narrowing its theory to licensed content, such as Knowledge Panel imagery. The case continues.
The stakes reach past one vendor. If the amended theory holds, bypassing an anti-bot system to reach copyrighted material becomes a copyright issue, with statutory damages attached, for every scraping service. If it fails, Google’s legal path narrows back to technical measures — and the gray market keeps its moat.
The vendor landscape, priced
This is not a fringe economy. Outscraper lists $3 per 1,000 places, with 500 free monthly records. Apify’s Compass Google Maps crawler serves more than 596,000 user accounts at $1.50 to $4 per 1,000 places, depending on plan. It subdivides map grids to beat the roughly 120-results-per-area display cap.
Bright Data sells similar extraction at about $1 per record, with enterprise compliance paperwork. Scrape.do and ScrapingDog price their services at $1 to $1.16 per 1,000 requests. Desktop tools such as WappBlaster sell unlimited local extraction for $20 a year. Even SerpApi — the defendant in Google’s lawsuit — continues to market a Google Maps engine.
What would change the equilibrium
Three developments could reshape this market. A Google win on the amended DMCA theory would move the industry’s risk from contractual to statutory. Google could also reprice the Places API, though its March 2025 changes moved the other way, replacing a pooled $200 monthly credit with smaller per-SKU free allowances. Or privacy regulators could act: reviews carry author names, and GDPR-style regimes govern storage and use regardless of how data was collected. Nothing on the current record suggests the first two are imminent.
What this means for data teams
The decision framework is straightforward. If the use case fits Google’s terms — store locators, address autocomplete, in-app maps — the official API is the right answer. If the use case is building a business database, the official API is designed to exclude you. The scrapers selling that data are betting that terms-of-service risk stays a cost of doing business.
Teams buying scraped lists should ask vendors where the data came from. Collection is only half the legal question; what you do with personal data afterward is the other half. Monitor the SerpApi docket. This article is journalism, not legal advice.
Editor’s Note
This feature was assigned after TechRecast rejected a press release from Leadsscraper.io, a reseller of Outscraper’s scraping service; the article is not about that company.
Sources: Google’s published Maps Platform price list and terms, as documented on its developer pages; the docket of Google LLC v. SerpApi LLC, No. 4:25-cv-10826-YGR (N.D. Cal.), including the December 2025 complaint, the February 2026 motion to dismiss, the 20 July 2026 order and Google’s amended complaint. It also uses the published rulings in Van Buren, hiQ and Meta v. Bright Data, plus vendor pricing pages and benchmarks.
The benchmarks come from companies that sell competing scrapers, and TechRecast treats their self-ranking accordingly. TechRecast computed the $185–$215 estimate itself from Google‘s published prices. The reading that existing case law extends to Google Maps scraping is labeled analysis where it appears. Nothing here is legal advice.