Get past the 120-result limit of Google Maps
Last updated: 27 October 2026
Type "plumber" into Google Maps and scroll down the list: it stops at about 120 businesses, even in a city that has far more. That is the limit of a single search, and the main reason why a lead list taken from Google Maps comes out incomplete.
Where the limit comes from
Google Maps loads results in pages of 20 around the area on screen, and stops offering more after about six pages. Businesses further away, or judged less relevant, never appear. Zooming out does not help: the list stays capped, it just covers a larger area more thinly.
The manual workarounds
- Move the map neighbourhood by neighbourhood and run the search again each time.
- Search by town, postcode or district ("plumber Manchester M4").
- Paste the results into a spreadsheet and remove the duplicates.
That works for one city. For a region or a country, it means hundreds of searches and as many duplicates to sort out.
The method: grid the map
The idea is to replace one big search with many small ones:
- lay a grid of points over the territory;
- run the same search from each point, each one limited to about 120 results around it;
- drop the duplicates, since the areas overlap, using each listing's unique ID;
- tighten the grid wherever a point is saturated, in big cities.
How SweepLead does it
SweepLead applies this method with country plans prepared in advance:
- one point every 40 km inside the country's borders;
- no point where no town of at least 1,000 people lies within 25 km (deserts, high mountains);
- at least one point for every city of 50,000 people and for every region;
- a check: in every country, 99 to 100% of towns of 10,000 people lie within 45 km of a point.
During collection:
- when a point is saturated within a small radius (a big city), SweepLead splits it into 4 sub-points set twice as close;
- a listing already collected is recognised and skipped from one search to the next;
- the queue runs on its own in your Google Maps tab, at a steady pace: 3 to 6 seconds between pages, and at least one minute between searches by default. A whole country therefore takes several hours.
With one query and the France plan, SweepLead runs 392 searches instead of one. You can also tick only some regions. The 20 plans add up to 6,789 points: see the details by country.
How many listings to expect
As many as Google Maps shows in the area, no more: the grid does not create businesses, it stops you losing them. The number depends on the trade and the country. A rare niche gives a few hundred listings for a country; a common trade, thousands. One example from our tests: collecting "car wash" across England returned 19,869 listings.
Try it
The free plan includes a demo region, North East England (7 points), and 200 listings a month. Plans for other countries are bought one by one on Pro (€14.90 per country) and all included on Agency.