How category targeting actually works
Most people scrape Google Maps by typing a generic keyword and taking whatever comes back. That produces duplicates, irrelevant businesses, and a list nobody wants to call.
Google assigns every listing a primary category from a fixed taxonomy — the same taxonomy a business owner picks from when they create a Google Business Profile. Scraping by that exact category name instead of a free-text keyword is what separates a clean list from a messy one. “Roofing contractor” is a category. “Roofer near me” is not.
The second half is filtering. Every business you scrape costs one credit, so filters that run during the scrape — not afterwards — are what keep a job cheap. Each industry below has a recipe that reflects how that vertical actually behaves.
Construction & Trades
168 Google Maps categories in this group
Who buys these leads: Marketing agencies pitching local SEO and Google Ads, job-management software (ServiceTitan, Jobber, Housecall Pro competitors), equipment and materials suppliers, and commercial insurance brokers.
exclude_website: true + min_reviews: 5 — a trades business with real reviews but no website is actively earning money and visibly missing infrastructure. That is the highest-converting web-design and SEO list in this vertical.
Healthcare & Dental
163 Google Maps categories in this group
Who buys these leads: Practice-management and patient-booking SaaS, medical and dental equipment sales, healthcare staffing and recruiting firms, reputation-management agencies, and medical billing services.
min_rating: 4.0 + max_reviews: 100 — established enough to have budget, small enough that the owner still takes the call. Filtering out the 500-review practices removes the corporate groups where nobody local can sign anything.
Legal & Professional Services
111 Google Maps categories in this group
Who buys these leads: Legal and accounting practice software, lead-generation and intake services, IT and cybersecurity providers, commercial real estate brokers, and white-label marketing agencies.
require_phone: true + min_reviews: 10 — professional-services firms live on referrals and often have thin review counts, so a phone number matters more than rating here. Scrape by specific practice area rather than the generic 'Lawyer' category; the pitch has to match the specialty.
Food & Drink
480 Google Maps categories in this group
Who buys these leads: POS and online-ordering platforms, food distributors and wholesalers, delivery aggregators, restaurant marketing agencies, and equipment suppliers.
exclude_website: true + min_rating: 4.5 — a 4.5-star restaurant with no website is a business people love that is invisible online. This is the single best web-design list in any vertical, and it is also the strongest online-ordering pitch.
Auto Services
145 Google Maps categories in this group
Who buys these leads: Dealer management systems, automotive CRM and lead tools, parts distributors, warranty and F&I product providers, and reputation-management agencies.
min_reviews: 20 + require_phone: true — auto businesses accumulate reviews fast, so a low count usually means a very new or very small operation. Independents convert better than franchised dealers, which have corporate procurement.
Beauty, Fitness & Wellness
55 Google Maps categories in this group
Who buys these leads: Membership and class-booking software, payment processors (recurring billing is universal here), supplement and retail-product wholesalers, and social-media marketing agencies.
exclude_website: true + min_reviews: 15 — boutique studios and salons run almost entirely on Instagram and word of mouth. A busy salon with no website is a genuinely warm inbound-style lead for both web design and booking software.
Want a worked example?
The restaurant vertical has the most detail written up — every step from category selection through to the filters that isolate independent operators from chains, plus what each field is actually good for in a pitch.
Running this at scale
If you are building lists for more than one industry — an agency onboarding clients, or a sales team covering several verticals — the categories and filters above map directly onto API parameters. One POST /scrape per vertical, with query set to the category name and the recipe passed as filters.
Build your first list free
50 credits, no credit card. Pick a category, pick your states, download the CSV.