You need every dentist in Texas, every auto shop in Ohio, or all restaurants in Florida, as a file you can load into a database or a map. There are three ways to get it, and they differ mostly in how much cleaning you'll do afterwards.

Option 1: open map data

Overture Maps publishes an open dataset of places, including businesses, that you can download and filter by state and category. It's free and covers a lot. We used it to pull 400 random US places for our Google Maps closed-business test .

The catch is freshness. Open map data includes businesses that have since closed or moved. In that test, VOYGR marked 93 of the 400 as closed. Plan to validate before you rely on the file.

Option 2: scrape map listings

Scraping tools pull listings from map sites by search area. You get what the map shows, including its mistakes: in our test, 23 of 86 confirmed closures still showed as open or had no listing on Google Maps.…