Q: Scrape Gmaps
Can we extract business information from Google Maps for a specific town and compile three separate lists: one containing businesses with email addresses, another with phone numbers, and a third that includes both emails and phone numbers for cold marketing purposes?

SeanP_AgenticFlowAI
Apr 27, 2025A: Hey DIGITAL.INBOUND,
That's a common goal for local lead generation! Here's how you can approach this with AgenticFlow, keeping in mind that directly scraping Google Maps can be challenging due to their anti-scraping measures:
Scraping Google Maps Data (The Core Task):
Direct Scraping: Our basic web_scraping node likely won't work reliably on Google Maps due to its complexity and anti-bot features.
Recommended Approach (Using a Specialized Scraper via MCP): Your best bet is to use a dedicated web scraping service designed for difficult targets like Google Maps. We have an integration with Apify (https://agenticflow.ai/mcp/apify).
You would sign up for an Apify account (they have Google Maps scraping "Actors").
Connect your Apify account to AgenticFlow using the Apify MCP and your Apify API key (BYOK).
In your AgenticFlow workflow, you'd use the Apify node to run the Google Maps scraping task for your specific town, targeting business listings.
Extracting Email and Phone Numbers:
The data returned by the scraper (e.g., from Apify) will contain various business details. Phone numbers are often included directly in Google Maps listings.
Email addresses are typically not listed directly on Google Maps profiles. You might get the business's website URL. Getting the email would require an additional step – scraping the business's own website (potentially using Apify again or our Web Scraping node on the website URL found) to look for contact information.
Use an LLM node in your workflow after the scraping step. Feed it the scraped data and prompt it specifically: "From this data, extract the business name, phone number (if available), and email address (if available). Format the output as JSON."
Compiling the Lists:
Connect Google Sheets using its MCP: https://agenticflow.ai/mcp/google_sheets
After the LLM extracts the data, add logic to your workflow:
Check if an email exists and a phone number exists -> Append to "Both List" sheet using Google Sheets MCP.
Check if only an email exists -> Append to "Email Only List" sheet.
Check if only a phone number exists -> Append to "Phone Only List" sheet.
(This logic might be simple conditional routing in the future, or currently handled by instructing the LLM or an Agent how to categorize before sending to Sheets).
In Summary:
Yes, it's possible to automate the process within AgenticFlow.
You'll need to leverage a specialized scraping tool like Apify via its MCP (and an Apify account/key) for reliably getting data from Google Maps.
You'll use LLM nodes to parse the scraped data accurately for contact info.
You'll use the Google Sheets MCP to write the data to your separate lists based on simple checks.
Be aware that extracting emails directly from Google Maps is rare; you'll likely need to scrape the linked business websites as a secondary step if emails are crucial.
This involves multiple steps and configuring external services like Apify, so Tier 3 or 4 would be beneficial if you need priority support during setup.