03Places · Prospecting
Companies without a website — a prospect list you build, not buy
Every web design or local-SEO agency's best lead is a real business that doesn't have a
site yet. Google Maps lists them right next to their competitors who do — the
website field is either a URL or it's empty. This page is how to turn that
gap into a list, honestly, with no invented conversion numbers attached.
The field is already there — you're filtering, not scraping something new
There is no special "no-website" mode on the API. Every place record from
/rechercher or /balayer already carries a website
field, present or null. Sweep a category over an area, then keep the rows
where that field is empty. That's the whole mechanism — no separate product, no premium
filter to unlock.
How big is the gap, really?
On a real sweep of bakeries in Lyon, the completeness block measured
44% website fill rate. Read the other way: 56% of that
category, in that city, had no listed site. That's one real sample, one category, one
city — not a universal rate, and we won't dress it up as one. Run the same sweep on your
own target category and market, and the completeness block tells you the
real number before you build a list around it.
Building the list
- Pick a category and an area — a city with
/balayer, or start from the free/villeslist of 16 preloaded cities. - Sweep it. The response dedupes on the place identifier, so overlapping cells don't inflate the count.
- Keep the rows where
websiteisnullor empty. Those are businesses with no site to link to at all — not a slow site, not a Facebook-only page, genuinely nothing listed. - Leave
emails=trueoff for this pass — it only reads an address off a site the place already has, so it has nothing to read for a no-website prospect.
What we won't do is attach a close rate or a revenue-per-lead number to this list — we haven't measured one, and a made-up figure would be worse than none.
Pricing, in plain units
One event is one place returned, filtered or not — the filtering happens on your side, after the response. A pilot sweep of a few hundred places costs a fraction of a dollar.
place — map record
place-contact — record + email read from the site
Pay per place returned — you are charged only for events the actor actually returns, never for an empty run. Metered and billed by Apify; no separate RankFabrik account to open.
Questions
Is web scraping illegal?
Not inherently, and there is no single yes/no answer. Collecting data that is publicly visible without logging in is generally treated differently from bypassing a login or a paywall, and how a given jurisdiction and a given target's Terms of Service apply can change the answer. This is general information, not legal advice — read the terms of whatever source you plan to collect from, and check with a lawyer for your specific case.
What is the best free Google Maps scraper?
Honestly: there isn't a permanently free one worth trusting for volume, on RankFabrik or elsewhere — free tools cap out fast or go stale. What RankFabrik does offer for free is `/villes`, the list of 16 preloaded cities ready to sweep, which uses no billing units. Past that, pay-per-event pricing with no monthly minimum means a real test batch costs a few cents, not a subscription.
Is there a free database of US business listings?
Not a static one that stays current — business listings change constantly, so anything free and pre-built is stale by the time you use it. RankFabrik doesn't publish one either; `/villes` is free but only lists preloaded cities, not records. The honest alternative is pay-per-event pricing with no minimum: a pilot list of a few hundred places costs under a dollar rather than requiring a subscription.