AI-Powered Scrapers & Alternative POI Sources
ScrapeGraphAI, Crawl4AI, Overture Maps, AllThePlaces, OSM

AI/LLM-Powered Scrapers
AI/LLM-Powered Scrapers
ScrapeGraphAI (MIT / Free)
Describe what you want in plain English, it extracts structured JSON without CSS/XPath selectors. Auto-adapts to layout changes. Supports GPT, Gemini, Groq, Azure, Hugging Face, local Ollama models.
GitHub
Crawl4AI (58K Stars, Apache 2.0)
Open-source LLM-friendly web crawler. Outputs clean Markdown for RAG/agents. Heuristic noise filtering, CSS/XPath/LLM extraction. Local-first (no API costs).
GitHub
Firecrawl
Developer API that outputs clean Markdown from any URL, optimized for LLM ingestion. Used in enrichment pipelines alongside Maps scrapers.
firecrawl.dev
LLM Query Expansion
Not a scraper per se, but a technique: use LLMs to generate category synonyms and related search terms to multiply coverage per geographic area. "dentist" becomes "dental clinic", "oral surgeon", "dental practice", etc. Combined with any scraper for 3-5x more results.

Alternative POI Data Sources (No Scraping)
Alternative POI Data Sources
Free or commercial POI databases that don't require scraping Google Maps.
Overture Maps Foundation (64.8M POIs Free)
Backed by Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, TomTom, Foursquare. The strongest free alternative to Google Maps data.
Size
64.8M places — Meta (~59.2M), Foursquare (~6.7M), Microsoft (~7.4M), AllThePlaces (~1.7M)
Fields
Names, categories (64+), phones, emails, websites, socials, addresses, brand, operating_status, confidence score, coordinates
Format
GeoParquet on S3 and Azure Blob. Python CLI, DuckDB SQL, browser Explorer
License
CDLA-Permissive-2.0 / ODbL (commercial use OK)
Limits
Monthly updates (not real-time). No reviews/photos. Thinner outside Western countries
Warning: Reddit reports Places layer stopped updating as of Sept 2024 release. Verify current state.
Overture Places Guide | Downloads
Overture-Based API (Community-Built, 200x Cheaper)
A developer built a Places API using Overture data + Rust/Axum + PostGIS. Free 5K/mo, $10/100K, $30/500K, $80/2M — vs Google's ~$1,700 for 100K.
Other Alternative Sources
Source
POIs
Free Tier
Key Strength
Reviews?
OpenStreetMap (Overpass API)
Varies
Unlimited, no key
Free, query any tag combo. Overpass Turbo
No
Foursquare Places
100M+
Commercial
Richest venue data, behavioral insights, check-ins
Tips only
HERE Technologies
Global, 400+ cats
250K tx/mo
TripAdvisor ratings, EV/fuel data, chain ID
Via TripAdvisor
TomTom
~100M, 180+ countries
50K daily tx
Navigation-optimized, relevance scoring
No
Mapbox
Global
100K req/mo
Polished SDKs
No
Geoapify
OSM-based, 400+ cats
3K credits/day
Transparent pricing, can cache/store
No
Yelp Fusion API
Millions
5K calls/day
3 reviews max via API. Open Dataset: 8.6M reviews (academic)
3 (API), 8.6M (dataset)
AllThePlaces
20M+
Unlimited (CC-0)
4,100+ Scrapy spiders, weekly updates
No
MapQuest
Various
Limited
Search API v5: radius/rect/polygon/corridor
No
Nominatim
OSM geocoding
Free
Forward/reverse geocoding
No
Photon (Komoot)
OSM geocoding
Free
Typo-tolerant, multilingual
No
OSM Reality Check (from Reddit): OpenStreetMap is poor for business/POI data. Business coverage is ~75% at best, biased toward bigger/popular locations.
Data Providers & Marketplaces
Provider
Dataset
Pricing
Google Maps?
Bright Data
200.7M+ records
$0.0025/record
Yes
Datarade
60M+ US (varies)
By provider
Yes
Veridion
134M+ businesses
~$99/user/mo
Partial
SafeGraph
52M+ POIs
Commercial
Partial (foot traffic)
Dataplor
Various
Commercial
Partial (LatAm strong)
Xtract.io
6M+ locations
Commercial
Partial
Coresignal
N/A
N/A
No (employee data only)
Data.world
N/A
N/A
No (data governance)
Export & Data Liberation Tools
Google Takeout: Export saved/starred places (CSV/JSON, no coordinates — needs geocoding)
Takeout Tools: Adds coordinates, converts to GeoJSON/KML/GPX
json2kml: Python converter for saved places to KML
Export-Google-Maps-Saved-Places
Firefox GPX Exporter: Export saved lists as GPX with lat/lon