How to Export Google Maps Results to Excel (Free, 2026)

You searched “plumbers in Denver” on Google Maps, you have a screen full of results, and you want them in a spreadsheet. There is no “Export” button. Google Maps is built for looking at places, not for handing you a list of them.

There are still four workable routes. Which one fits depends on how many rows you need, whether you saved the places yourself, and whether you have a developer nearby. After those, we cover the part most tutorials skip: getting the file into Excel without phone numbers losing their leading zeros or turning into 4.15E+10.

We build one of the tools mentioned below (MapsScraper, a Chrome extension), so the bias warning is up front. The other three routes are covered as if we didn’t.

Method	Good for	Cost	Skill needed	What you get
Copy-paste	Up to ~20 businesses	Free	None	Whatever you copy
Google Takeout	Places you saved to your own lists	Free	None	Place name, note, Maps link
Places API	Developers building a pipeline	Pay per request after free caps	Coding	Structured fields, up to 60 results per query
Browser extension	Hundreds of businesses, recurring	Free tier or subscription	None	Name, phone, website, address, rating and more

Option 1: Copy-paste by hand (and when that’s fine)

For a short, hand-picked list, manual copying is the right answer. If you need the 15 best-reviewed accountants in one neighborhood, you’ll look at each listing anyway, and copying three fields per row takes maybe 20 minutes.

A few habits make it less painful:

1. Set up your columns first: Name, Phone, Website, Address, Rating, Maps URL, Notes.
2. Format the Phone column as Text before you paste anything (Home > Number format > Text). This stops Excel from eating the leading zero or the + sign.
3. Copy the listing’s link from the Share button so you can get back to it later.
4. Paste with Paste Special > Values so you don’t drag in web formatting.

Past 30 or 40 listings, errors pile up (a phone in the website column, a skipped row) and the afternoon is gone.

Option 2: Google Takeout for places you saved yourself

If the places are already in your own Google Maps lists (“Want to go”, “Favorites”, or a custom list you built), Google gives you an official export. Google’s help page for creating a list of places describes the steps:

1. Go to takeout.google.com.
2. In “Create a new export”, make sure Saved is checked (deselect everything else to keep the download small).
3. Click Next step, pick a destination, frequency and file type.
4. Click Create export and wait for the email with the download link.

Google’s help page doesn’t list the file’s columns; according to a third-party walkthrough by Nick Gracilla (secondary source), you get one CSV file per saved list, including any notes you wrote, but no street addresses and no latitude/longitude. Fine for backing up a travel list; not much use for a sales list, since there are no phones or websites.

The bigger limit: Takeout only exports what you saved. It can’t export the results of a search you just ran. To get a search result list into Excel you need one of the next two options.

Option 3: The Google Places API (if you have a developer)

The official, structured way to pull business data is the Places API. A developer sends a Text Search request like “plumbers in Denver”, gets JSON back, and writes the fields into a CSV. Three things to know first:

It returns a capped number of results. According to Google’s Text Search documentation, each page holds at most 20 places, and “Text Search (New) returns a maximum of 60 results across all pages.” For a bigger list you split the query by neighborhood or ZIP code.

The fields you want sit in the expensive tier. Google’s data fields table puts phone numbers, website, rating, review count and opening hours in the Enterprise SKU. On Google’s pricing page (checked September 2026), Text Search Enterprise includes 1,000 free calls a month, then costs $35.00 per 1,000 calls; Place Details Enterprise is $20.00 per 1,000 after 1,000 free. For a few hundred businesses a month that’s small money. The real cost is the developer time to set up a Cloud project, billing, an API key and the script.

You can’t keep most of the data. Google’s Places API policies say you “must not pre-fetch, cache, or store Places API content” outside the allowed exceptions; the place ID is exempt and can be stored indefinitely. A spreadsheet of names and phone numbers that you keep for months is exactly the kind of storage those terms restrict, so check the terms with whoever owns your Google Cloud account.

For a product feature, the API is the right tool. For a one-off spreadsheet, it’s a lot of setup.

Option 4: A browser extension, step by step

The middle path is an extension that reads the results you see on screen and writes them into rows. That’s what MapsScraper does. It runs in your own browser with your own IP, there are no API keys, and it works in Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera and Vivaldi.

One thing to know before you start: MapsScraper isn’t on the Chrome Web Store. You install it from a ZIP file using “Load unpacked”, and the install page walks through it. After that:

1. Open the side panel from the extension icon.
2. Type a keyword and a location, for example “dentist” and “Austin, TX”.
3. Set filters before scanning if you want a tighter list: minimum rating, minimum review count, phone required, website required, and a max results number.
4. Pick a speed mode. Slow, normal or fast. Slow is the safer choice for long runs.
5. Start the scan. The extension opens the Google Maps search, scrolls the result list, opens each business and pulls its details.
6. Add more searches if you need to. Append mode adds a new search (say, the next suburb) to the existing results; clear mode starts fresh.
7. Export. Export all rows, or tick specific rows and export only those.

The free plan exports CSV with these columns: place ID, Name, Phone, Website, Address, Category, Rating, Review Count, Open Hours, Latitude, Longitude, Google Maps URL and Featured Image. It covers 50 leads a month. Premium ($9.90/month or $79/year) adds Excel .xlsx export and visits each business website to find an email address and Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn links, plus a WhatsApp link built from the phone number. Google Maps itself doesn’t show emails, which is why that step needs the website visit; our guide to extracting emails from Google Maps covers how that works and where it falls short.

If you’d rather compare tools first, the landing page for our Google Maps scraper Chrome extension lists what each plan includes, and MapsScraper’s plans sit side by side there. And if you’re wondering about the legal side of collecting business listings, we wrote up what’s allowed and what isn’t.

CSV vs XLSX: the gotchas that break your sheet

When an export looks broken, the data is usually fine. The problem is what Excel does to a CSV when you double-click it.

Garbled characters (é, ü, ñ turning into symbols)

A CSV is plain text, so Excel has to guess its encoding. Microsoft’s support article on opening CSV UTF-8 files correctly says a UTF-8 CSV opens normally “if it was saved with BOM (Byte Order Mark)”. Otherwise, import it through Data > Get Data > From File > From Text/CSV and choose 65001: Unicode (UTF-8) as the file origin. MapsScraper writes its CSV with a UTF-8 BOM, so a café in Montréal should survive a double-click; files from other sources may not.

Leading zeros and ”+” signs disappearing

Excel treats +1 512... or 0212... as a number and strips what it considers noise. Microsoft’s article on keeping leading zeros and large numbers confirms Excel removes leading zeros by default, and that formatting cells afterward “will not restore leading zeros that were removed prior to formatting.” The fix has to happen on the way in: set the column to Text during a Text/CSV import, or type an apostrophe before the number.

MapsScraper writes phone numbers as ="+15125550123" so Excel keeps them as text. If you see that wrapper in a plain text editor, that’s why.

Long numbers turning into scientific notation

The same Microsoft article explains that Excel converts large numbers to scientific notation (a phone like 41512345678 can show up as 4.15123E+10) and has “a maximum precision of 15 significant digits,” so anything longer gets rounded. Phone numbers with country codes and long IDs are the usual victims. Import those columns as Text. If you’re on Excel for Microsoft 365 or Excel 2024, the Automatic Data Conversions setting mentioned in that article lets you switch these conversions off.

When to just use XLSX

An .xlsx file stores the cell types, so none of the above happens. If a colleague will open the file by double-clicking, send XLSX. If the file goes into a CRM import, CSV is usually what the importer wants.

Cleaning the sheet in Excel

Raw exports need ten minutes of cleanup. The basics:

Remove duplicates. Overlapping searches (append mode across neighboring suburbs, for example) produce repeats. Select the table, go to Data > Remove Duplicates, and dedupe on the place ID or Google Maps URL column rather than the name. Two different “Joe’s Pizza” locations share a name but not an ID.

Normalize phone numbers. Decide on one format, ideally international (+1 512 555 0123), and stick to it. If a column has mixed formats, a helper column with =SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(B2," ",""),"-",""),"(","") strips the common separators so you can spot duplicates and bad lengths.

Split the address. Addresses usually come as one comma-separated string. Use Data > Text to Columns with a comma delimiter, or in Excel for Microsoft 365 and Excel 2024 use TEXTSPLIT: =TEXTSPLIT(E2, ", "). Check a few rows by eye. Suite numbers and missing postcodes shift the pieces into the wrong columns.

Filter out what you can’t use. Sort by Rating and Review Count and drop rows without a phone or website if your outreach needs them.

For a fuller pipeline (email validation, phone checks, refresh cadence), see our guide to cleaning and verifying Google Maps lead data. If you work with Turkish businesses, we also have a Turkish guide to pulling Google Maps business lists into Excel that covers +90 numbers and Turkish characters.

Frequently asked questions

Can I export Google Maps search results to Excel directly?

No. Google Maps has no export button for search results. Google Takeout exports only lists you saved yourself, as CSV files with names, notes and links but no addresses or coordinates. For search results you need to copy them by hand, use the Places API, or use an extension.

Is there a free way to export Google Maps to Excel?

Yes, with limits. Copy-paste and Google Takeout are free. The Places API includes a free monthly allowance per SKU before charges start (1,000 calls for the Enterprise tiers that include phone numbers, checked September 2026). Extensions vary: some have free quotas, others are paid only, so check the current pricing page before you pick one.

Why do my phone numbers lose the leading zero in Excel?

Excel converts values that look like numbers into numbers, and numbers can’t start with 0. Import the column as Text through Data > From Text/CSV, or use an export that writes phones as text, as MapsScraper does.

How many businesses can I export from one Google Maps search?

One search gives you one result list, and the Places API caps Text Search at 60 results per query. For bigger lists, run several narrower searches (by neighborhood or ZIP code) and combine them, then remove duplicates on the place ID.