4.3 Million Businesses Are Marked Closed on Google Maps. Here's How to Scrape Them in 2026

Right now, 4,360,171 businesses in the United States are flagged "permanently closed" on Google Maps. That's not a historical archive. That's a live list of empty storefronts, orphaned customers, and suppliers who just lost an account.

Nobody publishes that number. Everyone says closed listings are a goldmine, and then they move on without telling you how big the mine actually is. We counted. To the listing. And we'll show you how to pull your slice of it — by city, by category, or across a whole state — in about three clicks.

This is the update to our closed-business playbook, rebuilt on 2026 data. Let's get into it.

What "Permanently Closed" Actually Means on Google Maps

Permanently closed, temporarily closed, or just badly maintained? Google tracks three states. Most scrapers keep zero of them.

People have been asking about this for years. One of the most-read threads on r/GoogleMaps — currently the #1 result for this exact search — opens with a user saying: "I was wondering, sometimes if there is a place closed, and you click on it on Google Maps it says 'Permanently Closed'. Isn't there a way to find all…" There isn't, inside Google Maps. That's the whole problem. (Another thread — "Possible to search for 'permanently closed' locations" — ended the same way. And it's not only marketers asking: the urban-exploration crowd over on r/Urbex wants the same list, for very different reasons.)

Permanently closed vs temporarily closed

The distinction matters because it changes what the lead is worth. Here's the clean version:

Seasonal closures are not closures

A ski rental that shuts every April isn't closed. It's seasonal. Google usually shows that through hours, not a status flag, and if you treat those as dead you'll burn a landlord's afternoon for nothing. Read the status field, not the vibe.

Where the status actually comes from

Technically, "permanently closed" lives in a structured field. Google's own Places data documentation defines a business_status value — CLOSED_PERMANENTLY, CLOSED_TEMPORARILY, or OPERATIONAL. It gets set two ways: the owner marks it, or someone submits a community edit that Google accepts. Google's help page on marking a place reopened or closed spells out both paths. That crowd-sourced part? Keep it in mind — it's why section 7 exists.

How Many Businesses Are Actually Closed? The 2026 Numbers

Coresight projects 7,900 US store closures for 2026. Scrap.io counts 4.36 million closed listings on Google Maps today. The gap between those two numbers is the whole opportunity.

Here's why the gap is so wide: Coresight tracks chains. Google Maps tracks everything else — the single-location taqueria, the neighborhood accountant, the family hardware store that never made a headline. The chains get the press. The four million don't.

Retail chain closures tracked for 2026

On the chain side, the picture is real but modest. Coresight's midyear 2026 review puts closures around 7,900 (down about 4.5% from 2025) against roughly 5,500 openings (up 4.4%). So the chain churn is actually cooling. Who's leading it? Per CNBC's 2026 tracker:

What the bankruptcy data says

Zoom out from the malls and it looks heavier. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts reported that business bankruptcy filings rose 16.9% — from 23,043 to 26,941 — in the year ending June 30, 2026. Every one of those filings is, eventually, a pin on the map that turns red.

Restaurants: the permanently replenishing pool

Want a category that never stops feeding the list? Restaurants. Scrap.io counts 236,104 US restaurants flagged permanently closed, out of 663,173 restaurant listings total. That's 35.6% — more than one in three. This isn't a 2020 story either; the pool refills constantly, which is exactly why recently closed businesses near me is a search people run over and over. If you want permanently closed restaurants near me, that data is sitting there right now.

Why Closed Listings Are the Most Underrated Lead Source

Everyone filters closed businesses OUT. That instinct is exactly why the data is still cheap.

Think about what a permanently closed pin actually represents. The listing is dead. The opportunity around it is very much alive. There's a physical space someone still owns. There were customers, and they didn't evaporate — they went somewhere, or they're still looking. There were suppliers who just lost a recurring account. There were employees now hunting for work. And there's a website, slowly rotting, with backlinks still pointing at it.

And the flow never stops. The SBA Office of Advocacy reports that only 49.2% of new establishments survive five years — 33.9% make it to ten — with roughly 1.2 million establishments closing in 2022 alone. Turnover on that scale means the closed-listing pool refills faster than you can work it.

There's a real-estate angle too. Coresight expects more than 30 million square feet of US retail space to go dark in 2026. Every closed pin near a commercial strip is a lease about to hit the market — which is exactly why brokers care.

Someone built an entire company on this idea. ClosedPlaces.com maps every permanently closed US listing and sells it to people hunting vacant commercial property. When a business becomes a business, you know the underlying signal is real. Closed pins are a signal, not garbage — the same logic behind signal-based selling, just pointed at the end of the lifecycle instead of the start.

That video is about the opposite end — brand-new openings — but the mechanic is identical: isolate one slice of the business lifecycle with a status or date filter, and you've got a list nobody else is calling. Closures are the flip side of the same coin.

How to Scrape Closed Businesses With Scrap.io (Step by Step)

Three clicks. Area, category, one toggle. Let's do it.

Setting up your account

Start a free trial — 7 days, 50 searches, 100 export credits. That's enough to build a real list and test outreach before you spend a cent on a subscription. The onboarding video below walks the whole thing end to end if you'd rather watch than read.

Once you're in, you pick a category (or skip it entirely — more on that in a second) and a location. Scrap.io indexes 225,676,406 establishments across 195 countries and 4,000+ categories, refreshed in real time at the moment you export. No frozen database.

Turning on the "Permanently Closed" filter

This is the toggle that does the work. In the filter panel, set Permanently closed to Yes. That's it — now every result you pull is a dead listing, and nothing else clutters the file.

Here's the part that saves you money: on Scrap.io the filter runs before extraction, so credits are only spent on the closed listings you actually want. Other tools make you extract the whole city and sort the corpses out afterward. Not here. You pay for the closed pins. Full stop. (If you want the deep dive on every filter available, the Google Maps filtering guide covers the lot.)

Stacking geography and quality filters

Now make the list sharp. Layer geography on top: a city, a county, a state, a whole country — or draw your own zone with GeoSearch. Radius mode gives you a circle around a point; Polygon mode lets you trace an irregular shape by hand, so you can carve out one district instead of a whole administrative area.

Then tighten with quality filters — minimum review count, rating range, claimed status. "All restaurants that permanently closed in downtown Dallas with 50+ reviews" is a real query you can build in seconds. One tip most people miss: the "permanently closed near me" listings often slip through category searches, so if you want everything in a zone regardless of type, run it without a category. That's the extract-every-business-from-an-area approach.

Exporting: what's in the file

Hit export and you get a CSV or Excel file — name, full address, GPS coordinates, category, hours, claimed status, phone (with fixed/mobile type), classified emails, social profiles, and website tech. Want to see the shape of it before you run your own? Here's a sample Scrap.io export file. This is your list of permanently closed businesses, ready to load into a CRM or a cold-mailing tool, and you can export closed businesses to CSV in one click.

Which Tools Actually Have a Closed Filter (2026 Comparison)

A year ago we said nobody else had a closed filter. That's no longer true — and pretending otherwise would be insulting. Here's the honest 2026 landscape.

Several tools now read the business_status field. Outscraper documents a business_status filter. Vonsel shipped a free Chrome extension (their July 2026 post calls the status "the field most scrapers drop"). Targetron lets you search closures by city and state. So the closed filter itself is now table stakes. The google maps business status field is not our moat anymore, and we're not going to pretend it is.

So where do we actually win? Three places. Scale — you can pull an entire state or the whole country in two clicks, which no Chrome extension and no raw Places API workflow does without a lot of glue. Cost discipline — filtering before credits spend, plus unlimited free counting. And freshness — the status is re-checked on the listing at export time, not served from a file that's three months stale. If the cost math is what you're weighing, the Google Maps API cost breakdown for 2026 lays it out. Bottom line? The filter is common now. The google maps closed filter export at country scale, without code, still isn't.

Six Ways to Turn Closed-Business Data Into Revenue

You've got 800 dead restaurants in a CSV. Now what?

A list is not a strategy. Here are six plays that actually convert a folder of closed pins into pipeline — closed business lead generation that isn't just spray-and-pray.

1. Fill the void. When a business closes, its customers are orphaned. If you sell a competing product or service, that catchment is suddenly up for grabs — you're not stealing anyone's clients, you're inheriting them.
2. Court the orphaned suppliers. Every closure just cost a handful of vendors a recurring account. They're motivated, they're reachable, and they'd love a replacement buyer. Sort your list by category and work backward up the supply chain.
3. Recruit the teams. Staff from a shuttered restaurant or shop are looking for work this week. Recruiters and expanding operators can turn a closure list into a hiring pipeline before the job boards even fill up.
4. Reclaim the dead backlinks. A closed business's website still has citations and links pointing at it. One SEO practitioner laid out this exact method publicly on the Local Search Forum — scrape the closed listings, find their orphaned links, claim them. If you want the full logic, see how local SEO and data scraping work together.
5. Spot vacant space before the market. A permanently closed pin is often a lease about to hit the market. Brokers who mine this data find vacant commercial property on Google Maps weeks ahead of the listing sites — the exact play behind a commercial real estate database.
6. Clean your own prospecting base. Run the closed filter against your existing CRM and cut the dead accounts. No more pitching a landlord about a unit that reopened, no more emails bouncing off defunct domains.

A Closed Flag Is a Lead, Not a Fact: How to Verify

Nothing kills a broker pitch faster than calling a landlord about an "empty" unit that reopened last month.

Remember where the status comes from — owners and community edits. That means it can lag reality by weeks, and occasionally it's just wrong. So treat every closed flag as a strong lead, then verify before you act. Nobody else on the SERP tells you this, and it's the number-one thing that goes sideways in real use.

A quick five-point sanity check before you dial:

1. Is the website still live, and does it say anything about closing?
2. Are there reviews from the last month or two? Fresh reviews usually mean fresh activity.
3. Does the phone number ring — or is it disconnected?
4. When did the listing first appear, and when was it flagged? Scrap.io's "first seen" date helps you sort recent flags from ancient ones.
5. Re-pull the list. A dated, freshly extracted file beats a stale one every time.

That last point is where real-time extraction earns its keep. Because Scrap.io re-checks the listing at export, you're working from today's status — not a snapshot someone cached in spring. A stale closure file is worth close to nothing. This data has a shelf life measured in weeks.

Is It Legal to Scrape Closed Business Data?

Asked roughly twice a week. Short answer: yes. Long answer: it depends what you do next.

You're collecting publicly available business information that owners themselves published — no login, nothing bypassed, nothing hidden behind a paywall. Scrap.io only handles public business data and is GDPR- and CCPA-compliant, with every data point traceable to its source. That part is settled. For the fuller treatment, see our piece on whether it's legal to scrape Google Maps.

What's regulated is the outreach, not the collection. Phone calls fall under the TCPA. Email campaigns fall under CAN-SPAM — which means honest headers, a real physical address, and a working opt-out on every send. If cold email is your channel, read the cold email compliance rundown before you hit send. Collecting the list is legal. Blasting it carelessly is how you get in trouble.

Automating Closure Monitoring (API, Make.com, MCP)

A business that was open on Thursday can be flagged closed on Friday. Monthly exports won't catch that.

Weekly scans, not one-time pulls

Closure data decays fast, so a one-time export is a snapshot of a moving target. Set a recurring scan — weekly, or even daily on a hot category — and you catch closures while they're fresh, while the phone still rings and the domain still resolves. That's the difference between recently closed businesses near me and a list of numbers that stopped working two months ago.

Piping closures into your CRM

Scrap.io ships a REST API (300 requests per minute, included on every plan) plus a native Make.com module. Wire it up once and new closures land in your CRM automatically — tagged, deduped, and routed to whoever owns that territory. No manual export, no copy-paste, no forgetting to run it.

Asking your AI to watch the map for you

Here's the 2026 part nobody else is doing. Scrap.io runs an official MCP server at scrap.io/mcp, so you can point Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini straight at the map and just ask. "How many restaurants closed in Austin this month?" — the count comes back, free, no credits. "Export the closed retail listings in Cook County with 20+ reviews" — done, in plain English. Your AI builds the radius, runs the filter, hands you the file. Try doing that with a Chrome extension. I'll wait.

FAQ

How do I find permanently closed businesses on Google Maps?

Google Maps has no built-in search for closed listings — you'd have to open each business and look for the red "Permanently closed" label. At scale, use a scraper that reads the business_status field: on Scrap.io you pick an area, optionally a category, set the "Permanently Closed" filter to Yes, and export the full list. Works from a single neighborhood up to an entire country.

What does "permanently closed" actually mean on Google Maps?

It means the listing has been marked as shut down for good — by the owner, or through an accepted community edit. It's a distinct status from "temporarily closed" (paused, planning to reopen) and from a seasonal schedule. Google keeps the listing live with the closed label rather than deleting it.

How many businesses are permanently closed in the US right now?

As of August 2026, Scrap.io counts 4,360,171 US business listings flagged permanently closed on Google Maps, including 236,104 restaurants. For chain retail specifically, Coresight Research projects around 7,900 store closures across 2026.

Is it legal to scrape closed business information?

Yes. You're collecting publicly available business information that owners themselves published — no login required, nothing bypassed. Scrap.io only handles public business data and is GDPR- and CCPA-compliant. What's regulated is what you do next: phone outreach falls under TCPA, email campaigns under CAN-SPAM.

Can I trust the closed status?

Treat it as a strong lead, not a verified fact. Status is owner- and community-maintained, so it can lag reality by weeks. Cross-check the website, recent reviews and the phone number before acting — and always work from a freshly pulled export rather than a stale file.

Can I filter for recently closed businesses in a specific area?

Yes. Combine geography (city, county, state, country, or a custom radius/polygon) with the closed filter, then narrow further by category, review count or rating. "All restaurants that closed in downtown Dallas with 50+ reviews" is a search you can run in about thirty seconds.

The Takeaway

Let's bring it back to the number we opened with: 4,360,171. That's how many US listings are sitting on Google Maps right now, flagged closed, waiting. Most people scroll past them. A few know better.

Here's your five-step version. One, decide which play fits your business — void-filling, suppliers, recruiting, backlinks, real estate, or list hygiene. Two, pull the closed listings for your market. Three, verify before you act. Four, reach out inside the rules. Five, set a recurring scan so you never work from stale data again.

And move quickly. Closure data has a shelf life — phone numbers disconnect, domains expire, customers move on. The list that's gold today is scrap in six months.