How many businesses are in my area? Sizing a local market
Updated July 22, 2026 · 5 min read
“How many plumbers are in Phoenix?” sounds like a question with an answer. Type it into Google Maps and you'll get a number that is confidently wrong, because the results feed stops at roughly 100–120 places regardless of how many exist.
If you're sizing a market — for a business plan, a territory, an investor deck, or just deciding whether a niche is worth a campaign — here's how to get a count you can defend.
Why the obvious methods undercount
A single map search is capped. Yellow-pages-style directories are stale and incomplete. Government registry data counts legal entities, which is a different population — it includes dormant companies and misses branches that trade under one registration.
Google Maps is, in practice, the most current census of businesses that are actually open and serving customers, because businesses maintain their own listings. It just has to be queried in pieces.
The method
- 1
Define the category precisely
“Restaurant” and “Italian restaurant” give wildly different numbers, and both are legitimate depending on your question. Write down which you mean before you count.
- 2
Split the geography into zip codes
Each zip code gets its own search, so each search stays well under the feed cap. Hubertino's location picker expands a city into its zips automatically; the zip-code guide explains the mechanics.
- 3
Deduplicate on place ID
Adjacent zip searches return overlapping businesses. Google's place ID is the reliable key for collapsing them — see the guide on place IDs and CIDs.
- 4
Segment the count
A raw total is rarely the useful number. Split by review count (businesses with zero reviews may be barely trading), by whether a website exists, and by chain versus independent using the domain column.
Reading the number you get
Treat the result as “businesses currently listed and findable on Google Maps in this category and area”. That's a real, useful population, and it's the one your competitors are also selling to. It is not the same as “registered businesses” or “businesses with revenue over X”, and you should say which you mean when you quote it.
Rough sanity check: in a mid-sized US metro, a common service category typically lands somewhere in the hundreds to low thousands. If your count comes back at 97, you almost certainly hit a search cap rather than found the market.
Turning a count into a plan
Once you have the list, the TAM number is the least interesting thing in it. The distribution matters more: how many have no website, how many sit below a 4.0 rating, how the count varies by neighbourhood. Those splits tell you which offer to lead with and where to start.
The same export doubles as the prospect list, which is the practical argument for counting this way rather than buying a market-size report.
Common questions
Does this count businesses that don't have a Maps listing?
No. A business invisible on Maps is invisible here too. For most consumer-facing local categories that's a small remainder; for B2B-only operations without a storefront it can be substantial.
How much does counting a city cost?
One credit per business delivered, so the cost is the size of the market. The 100 free signup credits are enough to size a single zip code or a small town before committing.