You searched “plumber” in a big city and expected hundreds of leads. The job finished with a number that looks small. Nothing is broken. A search loses listings at several steps on the way from Google Maps to your CSV, and most of them are on purpose. Here’s each step, in order.
1. Google Maps caps every search
Google Maps doesn’t list every business that matches a keyword. For one search in one location it returns its top results, and we request up to 100 per location. A city with 600 plumbers still gives you the 100 Google ranks highest for that phrase.
What to do: search more than one location per job (up to five), use neighborhoods or suburbs instead of one big city, or try a sharper phrase like “emergency plumber” or “drain cleaning”. The niche suggestions in the dashboard (and GET /v2/suggest in the API) list the exact Google categories for your niche.
2. Duplicates are merged
Searching nearby locations returns many of the same businesses twice. We merge duplicates by their Google listing ID, so each business appears once. The job shows both numbers: raw results and unique businesses.
3. Off-niche listings are dropped
Google matches keywords loosely. A “roofing” search returns roofing contractors, but also a bar called The Roof and an apartment complex with “rooftop” in its description. Before anything is charged, we classify each listing’s Google category against your niche:
- off-niche listings are stored but never charged, never enriched and hidden from your results.
- adjacent trades (say, a gutter company in a roofing search) are kept on the default
moderatesetting and dropped onstrict.
If you want everything Google returned, set strictness to off.
4. No website, no enrichment
Owner names, emails and tech stack all come from the business’s own website. A listing without one can’t be enriched, so it’s skipped: you still get its name, phone, address and rating, and it costs nothing. In some trades and towns a large share of listings have no website, which is worth knowing before you pick a niche.
5. Your budget runs out
Each business that has a website and gets enriched is charged one credit. If your balance or the job’s max_leads cap runs out partway, the rest are left over budget: not enriched, not charged. Top up or raise the cap and run the search again; domains enriched in the last 30 days come back cached at no charge.
6. Businesses you already have are excluded
If you turned on “exclude already exported”, businesses you exported in an earlier job are excluded before anything is charged. The same happens to the small number of businesses that asked us to remove them. Excluded businesses cost nothing.
7. Some enrichments fail
Websites go down, block crawlers or are just an empty page. When an enrichment fails, the credit is refunded automatically and the business is counted as failed.
Reading the numbers on a job
The job status shows every step, so you can see exactly where listings went:
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
total_raw | Everything Google returned, across all locations |
total_unique | After merging duplicates |
off_niche_count | Dropped as off-niche, not charged |
skipped_count | No website, returned free |
over_budget_count | Left unenriched when balance or max_leads ran out |
excluded_count | Already exported, or asked to be removed |
enriched_count | Enriched and charged |
failed_count | Enrichment failed, credit refunded |
The short version
Small results usually mean the search was too narrow, not that data is missing. More locations, neighborhood-level searches and two or three keyword variants per niche get you a much bigger list. You only pay for businesses that actually get enriched.
Want to see the numbers for your niche? Your first 100 leads are free.