That’s an excellent question, and it gets to the heart of what many people wonder when they first look into automating this kind of work. In practice, these tools work by automating what you would do manually by searching for businesses on online maps and systematically extracting the publicly displayed information like business name, address, phone number, website, and ratings. The big challenge and the reason for your valid concern about terms of service is that directly scraping Google Maps almost certainly violates Google’s Terms of Service, which puts you in a legal gray area and risks your IP address being blocked. This is why many turn to the official Google Places API as the only fully legitimate path, though it has strict limits and costs that can become high at scale. The middle ground is using third party data services that have already done the scraping, but this simply outsources the risk and you are still essentially paying for data that was likely obtained in violation of Google’s rules.