Local Search Tool

What this tool shows

Local searches such as “dentist in Leeds” or “pizza 10001” are answered from Google’s data about places. This tool sends your phrase and location to the Google Places API Text Search, the official way to query that data, and shows the businesses it returns: name, address, primary type, rating, number of reviews, opening status, website, a Google Maps link and the Place ID.

It is useful for checking whether a business is found for the words customers use, whether its details are right, and which other businesses match the same search. It is not a rank tracker. The Places API returns relevant places for a text query; it is a different product from the results a person sees in Google Search or the Maps app, which are personalised by the searcher’s location, language, history and device. The numbered positions in the results are the order the API returned them, nothing more.

Why an API and not a search page

Many local rank tools scrape Google results pages, which breaks Google’s terms and produces numbers that are hard to reproduce. We only use data we are allowed to use. That is why the tool needs a Places API key, why results carry Google Maps attribution, and why there is no button to download names, ratings and addresses: Google Maps Platform terms allow storing Place IDs, but restrict caching or exporting other Places content. The CSV export therefore contains each result’s position, Place ID and Maps link, which you can use to look the place up again later.

Location and device

The city or postcode you enter is added to the search text, and the country is sent as a region code so ambiguous names such as “Cambridge” resolve sensibly. This is not the same as searching from a specific spot: a person standing in one neighbourhood sees results biased to where they are. The Places API also has no device setting, so mobile and desktop cannot be compared here. The device field explains that rather than pretending otherwise.

Getting the most from it

• Search the way customers would: the service plus the area, with and without words such as “near me” replaced by the town name.
• Check your own listing is present, with the right category, address and website. Fix mistakes in Google Business Profile.
• Look at closed statuses. A business wrongly marked as closed loses visits until it is corrected.
• Use the Place ID from your result with the Review Link Generator to build a direct review link.

When the provider is not configured

If the site owner has not added a Places API key, the tool says so and offers a link that opens the same search in Google Maps instead. Nothing is simulated and no invented results are shown.

What happens to your data

Your query is sent from our server to Google and the response is shown to you. We do not store the query or the results, and they are not added to analytics.