To export Google Maps results to Excel, you need a tool in between, because Google Maps has no "download" button for search results. If you want your own saved lists, use Google Takeout and open the CSV it produces. If you want search results — "plumbers in Denver" with names, phones, websites and ratings — copy a handful by hand or use a scraper that writes an .xlsx file directly. For anything beyond about 120 businesses, the tool also has to split the map into smaller areas, because one search stops there.
Below are the four methods, the exact steps for each, what columns you actually end up with, and the Excel problems (broken columns, mangled phone numbers, duplicates) that most guides skip.
First: which "Google Maps results" do you mean?
Two different things get called "Google Maps results", and they export in completely different ways:
| You want to export | Best method | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Places you saved yourself (Favourites, Want to go, custom lists) | Google Takeout | A CSV per list: title, note, Maps URL, comment |
| Starred places | Google Takeout | GeoJSON with name, address and coordinates |
| A search: every "dentist in Miami" | Scraper (extension or cloud) | A row per business with phone, website, rating, reviews and more |
| A dozen businesses, once | Copy and paste | Whatever you copy |
If you're building a lead list, it's almost always the third row. Takeout only exports what you saved, not what a search returns.
Method 1: Google Takeout (your own saved lists)
Takeout is Google's official export of your account data, and it is the only built-in way to get Maps data out.
- Go to takeout.google.com and sign in.
- Click Deselect all, then tick Saved (for lists such as Favourites and Want to go) and/or Maps (your places) (for starred places).
- Click Next step, choose Export once, keep the .zip format and create the export.
- When the email arrives, download and unzip the archive.
- Open the saved-list CSV in Excel. For starred places, the file is GeoJSON — use Data > Get Data > From File > From JSON in Excel to flatten it into a table.
What to expect: saved lists come out as a CSV with four columns — Title, Note, URL and Comment. There is no address, phone number or coordinate in that file; each row is essentially a link back to Google Maps. Starred places are richer: the GeoJSON includes the business name, address and coordinates.
Good for: backing up your own lists, moving a travel list to another app. Not good for: prospecting. You would have to save every business by hand first, and you still wouldn't get phone numbers or websites.
Method 2: Copy and paste into Excel
For ten or twenty businesses, manual copying is fine and costs nothing.
- Search Google Maps and open the first listing.
- Copy the name, phone, website and address into separate columns in Excel.
- Repeat for each result.
Avoid the shortcut of selecting the whole results panel and pasting it into one cell. The text comes out as one ragged column, and splitting it with Text to Columns on spaces breaks every address apart. If you do paste in bulk, split on line breaks, not spaces, and expect to fix rows by hand.
Good for: a quick check, or learning which fields you really need before you pay for a tool. Breaks when: you need hundreds of rows, or the same list again next month.
Method 3: A browser extension that exports to Excel
An extension reads the Google Maps results panel while you search and builds a table you can download.
- Install the extension in Chrome or Edge and sign in.
- Search Google Maps for a category and location.
- Start the extension and let it scroll through the results.
- Download the file — ideally as .xlsx, not CSV (see the Excel section below for why).
Before you trust one, run a big search like "restaurants in Chicago" and count the rows. If you get somewhere between 100 and 125, the extension is reading a single capped search, not the whole city. We explain that limit in why Google Maps stops at 120 results.
Method 4: A cloud scraper (full areas, straight to .xlsx)
A cloud scraper does the same job on a server: you enter "dentists" and a city, close the tab and come back to a finished spreadsheet. For complete lists the tool must:
- Split the area into cells and keep subdividing dense cells until none hits the ~120 cap.
- De-duplicate by place ID, because overlapping cells return the same business several times. Matching on name would wrongly merge two branches of a chain.
- Tell you the count first, so a 4,000-business city doesn't surprise you after the fact.
Here's what that looks like in MapScraper, which runs as both a Chrome/Edge extension and a cloud scraper on one account:
- Search a category and location, for example "dentists in Miami".
- Check the free pre-count. It probes the area cell by cell and reports how many businesses the search contains — an exact number when no cell hits the cap, a range when some do. Nothing is deducted.
- Run the scan. The area is split into a quadtree and results are merged on place ID, so each business is delivered and charged once.
- Click Excel. The default file has 13 columns; Excel · all 41 fields and CSV and JSON are one click away.
You can download mid-scan, and a stopped job only costs the rows it delivered. The Google Places API is the other programmatic route; our guide to scraping Google Maps compares it with scrapers, including its 60-results-per-query limit.
Which columns should your Excel file have?
More columns is not better. Forty columns of IDs and coordinates push the name and phone off the screen, and nobody works a call list like that. Start from the job you're doing:
| Use case | Columns that matter | Columns to drop |
|---|---|---|
| Cold calling | Name, category, phone, city, rating, review count | Coordinates, photo URLs, place ID |
| Cold email | Name, email, website, city, category | Opening hours, plus code |
| Web design / SEO prospecting | Name, website (or its absence), phone, review count, claim status, weakness score | Photo URLs |
| Mapping / territory planning | Name, full address, latitude, longitude, postal code | Social profiles, reviews |
| CRM import | Everything, plus place ID as the unique key | Nothing — let the CRM decide |
MapScraper's default Excel export follows that logic: name, category, phone, email, website, full address, city, country, rating, review count, Instagram, Facebook and Maps URL. The full catalog — street, district, postal code, phone in E.164 format, place ID, CID, claim status, opening hours, digital weakness score and more — is described field by field in our field reference.
Remember that Google Maps itself has no email field. Any email column in an export came from crawling the business's own website; MapScraper checks the home, /contact and /about pages and records which page the address came from.
Excel problems that ruin Google Maps exports (and fixes)
These are the issues people hit after the export, and almost no guide mentions them.
1. Everything lands in column A. Excel chooses the CSV delimiter from your operating system's region settings. On a machine set up for Turkish, German, French and many other locales, Excel expects semicolons, so a comma-separated file opens as one long column. Fix: use Data > From Text/CSV and pick the delimiter manually — or download .xlsx, which has no delimiter to guess and opens the same in every locale.
2. Accented characters turn into garbage. "Café" becomes "Café" when Excel reads a UTF-8 file as the wrong encoding. Fix: import via Data > From Text/CSV and choose UTF-8 (65001). Files saved with a byte-order mark usually open correctly by double-click; MapScraper's CSVs include one.
3. Phone numbers lose their leading zero or plus sign. Excel converts anything that looks numeric into a number. Fix: import the phone column as Text, or use a phone column in E.164 format (+13055550123), which is also what dialers and CRMs expect.
4. Long IDs get rounded. Excel keeps 15 significant digits, so a long numeric Google CID opened from CSV can silently change its last digits — and then never match again. Import ID columns as text. In an .xlsx built correctly, IDs are already stored as text.
5. Business names run as formulas. A name that starts with "=", "+", "-" or "@" can be interpreted as a formula when the file is opened. A careful exporter escapes these. MapScraper's CSV prefixes them so they stay plain text, and its .xlsx writes every cell as a string or number, never a formula.
6. Duplicates. If you merged several searches yourself, sort by place ID (or Maps URL) and use Data > Remove Duplicates on that column — not on the name.
After the export: make the sheet usable
Once the data is in Excel, three minutes of setup makes it workable:
- Freeze the header row (View > Freeze Panes > Freeze Top Row) and turn on Filter (Data > Filter). MapScraper's .xlsx ships with both already set, plus clickable website and Maps links.
- Filter for your targets. For example, rating below 4.0 or fewer than 20 reviews for a reputation-management pitch, or "Has website = false" (in the all-fields export) for web design — see our businesses without a website playbook.
- Add your own working columns — Status, Called on, Notes — to the right of the data so a re-export never overwrites them.
If you'd like to see what a finished list looks like for one industry before you run anything, the dentist leads page shows the output for that category, and cold calling lists walks through turning an export into a call sheet.
Summary
- Google Maps has no export button for search results. Takeout only exports your own saved lists, and its saved-list CSV has no phone, address or coordinates.
- Copy and paste works for a dozen rows; a browser extension or cloud scraper is the practical route for real lists.
- One Maps search caps at about 120 results, so complete city lists need a tool that splits the area and de-duplicates on place ID.
- Prefer .xlsx over CSV: it avoids the delimiter, encoding, leading-zero and long-ID problems that break CSVs in Excel.
- Export only the columns your workflow uses; keep place ID if the data is going into a CRM.
To try it on your own search, MapScraper's free plan includes 300 leads a month with emails, the pre-count is free, and the Excel download is one click — no card required.