Marketing teams that prospect local businesses spend the first hour of every morning doing the same job: open Google Maps, scan the area, copy each name into a spreadsheet. The job is real and it does not change. The tool you use to do it is the only thing that moves.

This post is the working walkthrough for the headline job Leadline was built to do: harvest a whole region off Google Maps, end up with a clean list of businesses with name, address, phone, website, and hours, and have every row deduped against the rows you’ve already saved.

It takes about ten minutes the first time. Five after that.

Before you start

You need three things:

The Chrome extension installed. It’s the part that reads the pages you are already looking at — there is no headless farm and no third-party proxy.
A region in mind. “San Francisco, Mission District” works. “10007 zip” works. “Coffee shops near 24th and Valencia” also works — Google Maps accepts most natural-language queries.
A column to put the rows in. If you do nothing else, the rows stay in the extension’s own storage and export as Excel / CSV / NDJSON when you’re ready. If you sign into a Team workspace, they sync to a Postgres database we host.

That’s it. There is no separate “list” to create, no template to pick, no columns to map. Open the map, sweep, the rows appear.

Step 1 — Pan to the region

Open Google Maps and pan / zoom to the area you want to harvest. The tighter the zoom, the fewer cells you’ll need to sweep; the looser the zoom, the more area you cover per cell. For a single zip code, zoom level 14 is a good starting point. For a neighbourhood, zoom level 15. For a city, level 11–12 with a plan to break it into sectors.

The grid sweep does the rest. There is no headless farm doing this for you; the extension moves through the visible map region one cell at a time, in your browser, at the speed Google Maps itself will let it.

Step 2 — Start the sweep

Click the Leadline icon in your Chrome toolbar. The side panel opens. Type a name for the region — “Mission District” — and click Sweep.

You will see:

A progress label that ticks up as cells complete (e.g. Sweeping · 47/120).
A list of leads that fills in below as the sweep finds them.
Pins on the map at each place’s location, with a small “Save” pill on the ones Google Maps shows a place panel for.

If a cell comes back empty, Leadline does not invent rows. It skips it and moves on. Empty cells are common at the edges of a region — they are not a bug.

Step 3 — Use the Save pill on individual places

While the sweep is running, you can pin individual businesses that matter most. Find the place on the map (or in Search), open its place panel, and click Save. The row appears in your list immediately.

This is the same list the harvest fills. There is no “manual vs sweep” split — both routes land in the same column, deduped against each other.

A common pattern: start the sweep, then while it runs, jump to the Search tab and Save the obvious wins — the chains you already know about, the names that came up in conversation. The harvest catches the long tail.

Step 4 — Let the sweep finish, or stop it early

A sweep of a tight neighbourhood runs in 2–4 minutes. A sweep of a city takes 20–40 minutes. You can stop it at any time — what you have so far is yours. The partial result is not a draft, it is the list.

When the sweep finishes, you’ll see a final count. For the Mission District at zoom 15, expect somewhere between 80 and 200 rows depending on density: restaurants, coffee shops, retail, services — whatever Google Maps indexes for that region.

Step 5 — Clean the rows

Most of what comes back is real. Some of it is noise:

A cell at the edge of the zoom that caught a single business in the next region.
A place panel that closed before Leadline could read it.
A duplicate (the same business indexed under a slightly different name).

The extension flags each row with the fields it managed to fill in. Open the list, sort by completeness, and delete the half-rows that are missing a phone number and a website — those are usually the noise.

What remains is a list you can dial from. Phone, address, website, hours, category. Some will have an email address too, depending on what Google has indexed and how recently the place’s site has been crawled.

Step 6 — Move it to your pipeline

If you’re on Solo (the default), the rows stay in the extension’s local storage. Export to Excel when you’re ready — the export includes the charts you set up in any analytics view. Or to CSV or NDJSON if a downstream tool needs to read it.

If you’re on Team, the rows sync to the shared workspace the moment they finish saving. Open the Leadline tabs app, and the same list is there, ready to assign to a pipeline stage.

Either way, the time from “I want to call every plumber in this zip” to “the dialer has a queue of plumbers” is the ten minutes it took to sweep. Not the rest of the morning.

What this is not

A few things worth saying so the post does not over-promise:

Leadline is not a headless browser that you can point at a website you don’t have access to. It reads the pages you are already looking at, in your own browser, at the speed you drive it. If Google Maps shows you 200 results for a query, Leadline can harvest those 200. It cannot harvest 10,000.
Leadline is not a list vendor. You are not buying a list of businesses from us. You are running your own harvest, on your own laptop, against your own Google Maps session. The rows are yours the moment they save.
Leadline is not a workaround for Google’s anti-scraping measures. If Google starts throttling your session, Leadline slows down with it. That’s by design — we’d rather you get accurate rows at human speed than inaccurate rows at machine speed.

Where to go next

If you want to skip the reading and just do it: install the extension, open Google Maps, pan to your region, click Sweep. The whole loop is the post.

If you want to read more first:

The dialer — once you have a list, here’s how to work through it without losing the row you just called.
Saved views — turn the list into a URL you can paste to a colleague so they see the same filtered table.
Solo vs Team — when (and whether) to invite the rest of the team.

That’s the morning ritual: sweep the map, clean the rows, dial the queue.