How fast local business data goes stale: a refresh routine
By Doug Nielsen, Product Manager · Updated · first published
A lead list starts going stale the day you export it: fastest in hospitality and retail, slowest in licensed practices like dentists. The fix is a re-scrape on a cadence set by the vertical, compared row by row with your last pull.
Two columns from our Google Maps data extractor make a refresh simple: place_id to match pulls, business_status to flag closures. A scheduled refresh takes three calls in the Hubertino API documentation: start the scrape, poll it, download the rows.
Key takeaways
- Re-scrape restaurants and retail every 1–3 months, trades every 6, licensed practices usually every 12.
- In each diff, new place IDs are fresh leads; drop missing ones from your campaigns at once.
- Every refreshed business costs a credit, so monthly refreshes of a stable vertical buy little.
On this page4
What actually changes, and how quickly
| What changes | How fast |
|---|---|
| Openings and closures | Fast in hospitality and retail; comparatively stable in professional practices, licensed trades and medical clinics |
| Ratings and review counts | Weekly for busy businesses, so if your pitch quotes a rating, quote a recent one |
| Opening hours | Seasonally, and after ownership changes |
| Phone numbers and websites | Slowly but consequentially: a wrong number is a wasted call, a dead domain a bounced email |
Tip
Measure your own churn
A refresh routine
Set the cadence by how fast the vertical churns.
- Restaurants, bars, cafés, independent retail
- 1–3 months
- Trades and services
- 6 months
- Dentists, lawyers, clinics: usually enough
- 12 months
Re-scrape the same category and geography
Same categories, same ZIP codes, so the two pulls are comparable. A past scrape's Run again button prefills the same search.Diff on place ID
Rows only in the new pull are new businesses, often your best leads. Rows only in the old pull likely closed, moved or were delisted: suppress them before the next send. Update changed fields on the rest.Automate a short cadence
Call the REST API from a scheduler such as cron to rerun the scrape and diff it in code, or start from the weekly monitor template in our n8n integration.
Get the whole list in one job
- 100 free credits
- No card required
Common questions
Is a six-month-old list still usable?
How do I keep CRM notes when I refresh?
Does re-scraping cost full price?
Written by
Doug Nielsen, Product Manager
Doug works on Hubertino; the guides on this site are published under his name. Last updated .