Why GMapsScraper.io uses AI for email checks, not competitor reviews
Elke Qin is co-founder of GMapsScraper.io, which extracts business data from Google Maps for B2B sales teams and marketers. Qin explains where AI helps with email verification, why competitor comparisons still need hands-on testing, and how search and AI referrals are bringing in informed prospects.
Use AI for bounded tasks such as parsing messy website HTML to identify likely contact emails, but keep competitor comparisons grounded in first-hand product testing. For growth, prioritize honest comparison pages and product improvements customers request over chasing every new AI feature.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
My co-founder and I were running outreach for a local services business and spent hours copy-pasting from Google Maps into spreadsheets. We built a Chrome extension to do it in one click, shared it with a few friends in sales, and signups took off before we had a landing page. What makes us different is simplicity and pricing. Competitors like Outscraper charge per API call and require technical setup. We give you a browser extension, you search Google Maps like you normally would, and you export. Pay-per-use credits, no subscription — you only pay when you actually need data.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Most of our new business comes from organic search — specifically, people Googling competitor names plus "alternative." Those comparison pages convert at roughly 3x our generic content. We also get steady signups from the Chrome Web Store. Where I wish more came from: direct referrals and word of mouth. Our best customers found us through a friend, and they stick around longest. We’re working on making the product shareable enough that the referral loop happens naturally.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
Handed over: email extraction verification. We use Claude to parse messy website HTML and pull out the most likely contact email for a business. It’s faster and more accurate than the regex rules we wrote by hand. Taken back: writing our competitor comparison blog posts. We tried having AI draft them, but readers could tell. The posts that convert are the ones where we actually used the competitor’s product, documented real differences with screenshots, and were honest about where they’re better. AI can outline, but it can’t do the hands-on product testing that makes those pages credible.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
Yes, we’ve noticed. More people arrive already knowing what we do — they’ve read a comparison or seen us mentioned somewhere. The first question used to be "what is this tool?" Now it’s "does it work for [specific use case]?" We do see a small but growing number of visitors from AI referrals. When you ask ChatGPT or Perplexity for Google Maps scraping tools, we show up in the cited sources. It’s still a fraction of our traffic, but the visitors convert well because AI tends to recommend us in a purchase-ready context.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Do: write content that directly compares you to your competitors, honestly. Those pages are the highest-intent organic traffic you’ll get, and they’re exactly the kind of source AI assistants cite when someone asks "what’s the best tool for X." Also, invest in making your product simple enough that customers recommend it without you asking. Ignore: chasing every new AI feature announcement. Most of them won’t matter to your customers next quarter. Ship the thing your existing users keep requesting in support tickets — that’s where the real growth is.
Thank you to Elke Qin and the team at GMapsScraper.io for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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