Data source, geo-scoping, fields, and what “fresh” means
HOW WE BUILD THESE LISTS
by Usama Zafar, who builds and maintains PlotLeads
A lead list is only useful if you know where the data came from and what it does and does not contain. This page describes exactly how PlotLeads builds a list, in plain terms, so you can judge the data before you buy it rather than after.
Source
WHERE THE DATA COMES FROM
Every list is sourced from Google Maps business listings. When you run a search, we trigger a crawl of Google Maps for the trade and metro you asked for, using a dedicated Google Maps crawler running on Apify, the same engine that powers the result you would get typing that trade and city into Maps yourself. The result is a set of real, currently-listed businesses for that trade in that location — the same listings a person would see searching by hand, collected into a structured file with the phone, website, rating, and address pulled into named columns. We chose Google Maps as the source because it is the register home-services businesses actually keep current: a contractor who changes a phone number or rebrands updates their Maps listing long before any third-party database catches up, so sourcing from Maps directly is what keeps the data close to reality rather than a step removed from it.
We do not buy lists from data brokers and we do not maintain a large static database that slowly goes stale. The list is assembled from Google Maps for your specific request.
Geo-scoping
HOW WE KEEP RESULTS INSIDE YOUR METRO
The most common failure in scraped local data is geographic drift: you ask for one city and the file fills with businesses from neighbouring metros hundreds of kilometres away, which makes a list useless the moment you sort it by territory. We constrain the crawl to your requested location up front rather than hoping to clean it up afterward. The search is geo-scoped with a location query that is geocoded to the metro you entered, and the location is also carried inside the search term itself as a fail-safe, so the crawl stays in-region rather than spilling into the next market over. The reason we scope before the crawl rather than filter after it is that a post-hoc filter can only throw away rows you already paid to collect and still guess at which borderline suburb belongs to your market; gating the search at the source means the businesses that come back are the ones that genuinely serve the metro you are selling into.
This keeps genuine nearby suburbs that actually serve the metro while cutting the far-flung listings that make a list unusable. It is a scoping step applied before the crawl runs, not a filter we promise to apply afterward.
Fields
WHAT EACH ROW CONTAINS
Each row in your list is one business, and the columns are the fields exactly as that business publishes them on Google Maps — we do not invent, infer, or append anything that is not on the listing itself. This is a deliberate limit: the value of the data is that it mirrors the public record, so a row is only as complete as the business chose to make its own Maps profile. In practice every row carries the company name and address, most carry a phone number and a website, and all carry the Google rating and review count. Each field maps to a step in your outreach: the phone is your dial target, the website tells you whether the business has any web presence to pitch against, and the rating and review count let you score a list by how established each operator is before you spend time on it. The fields we return for each business are:
- Company name
- Phone number, where the business publishes one
- Website, where the business links one
- Google rating and review count
- Address and the business category as Google classifies it
These are public business details. Because the rating and review count travel with each row, you can sort a list by review volume to separate established operators from one-listing entries before you ever start dialing.
Freshness
WHAT “FRESH” MEANS HERE
Freshness on PlotLeads means the list is scraped live at the time you run the search, not pulled from a cache that was last updated months ago. A business that updated its phone number or website on Google Maps yesterday shows the new value, and a business that closed and was removed from Maps will not appear in your file. There is no fixed nightly or weekly refresh cadence to be out of step with, because each list is generated on demand rather than served from a pre-built store that ages between rebuilds. This matters because the usual way lead data goes stale is silent: a database is built once, sold for months, and quietly drifts from reality as numbers change and businesses close. Generating the list at the moment you buy it removes that decay window — the freshness is bounded by the age of the Google Maps listing itself, not by how long ago we last ran a refresh job.
The small five-business previews shown on our city pages are a stored sample so the pages load instantly for anyone browsing; the full, paid list you download is the live crawl described above.
Limits
WHAT WE DO NOT DO
Being honest about the limits matters as much as describing the method:
- We do not independently verify or re-dial each phone number, and we do not test each website. We return what the business publishes on Google Maps, which is current but not guaranteed correct — a business can list an old number itself.
- We do not append personal contact names, direct-dial extensions, or email addresses through a separate enrichment provider. The list is the public Google Maps business record, not an enriched decision-maker profile.
- We do not claim a completeness guarantee. Coverage reflects what is listed on Google Maps for that trade and metro at search time.
Where a meaningful share of a delivered list turns out to be inaccurate, we refund the corresponding credits — the policy is set out in our Terms of Service. Questions about the data or the method go to support@plotleads.com.