How fast local business data goes stale, and how to refresh it
Updated July 22, 2026 · 5 min read
A lead list is a photograph, not a database. Businesses close, move, rebrand, get new owners, change numbers and rack up reviews continuously — and none of that propagates into the spreadsheet you downloaded in March.
The question isn't whether to refresh, it's how often for your market and what to do with the differences.
What actually changes, and how quickly
Ratings and review counts change constantly — weekly for busy businesses. If your pitch quotes a rating, quote a recent one.
Opening hours change seasonally and after ownership changes. Phone numbers and websites change slowly but consequentially: a wrong number is a wasted call, a dead domain is a bounced email.
Openings and closures are the big one, and they vary enormously by trade. Hospitality and retail churn fast; professional practices, licensed trades and medical clinics are comparatively stable. Rather than trusting a headline churn statistic, measure your own: re-scrape one zip code you scraped six months ago and count how many rows changed. That number is specific to your market and worth more than any industry average.
A refresh routine
- 1
Set a cadence by vertical
Monthly to quarterly for restaurants, bars, cafés and independent retail. Semi-annually for trades and services. Annually is usually enough for dentists, lawyers, clinics and other licensed professions.
- 2
Re-scrape the same category and geography
Same categories, same zip codes, so the two pulls are comparable. Saving the scrape parameters is what makes this a two-minute job rather than a re-planning exercise.
- 3
Diff on place ID
Rows in the new pull only: new businesses, and often your best leads. Rows in the old pull only: likely closed, moved or delisted. Rows in both: update the changed fields in place.
- 4
Treat both sides of the diff as signals
New listings are new-business outreach. Disappeared listings should be suppressed from campaigns immediately — nothing damages credibility like emailing a business that closed.
- 5
Automate it if the cadence is short
The REST API lets you run the same scrape on a schedule and diff programmatically, which is worth setting up once if you're refreshing monthly.
Don't over-refresh either
Re-scraping a stable vertical every month costs credits and produces almost no delta. One credit per business delivered means a refresh of a 2,000-business list costs the same as building it, so match the cadence to how fast the market actually moves rather than to how often you feel anxious about the data.
If you only need one field to be current — say, whether a business still exists before a big send — a smaller re-scrape of the specific area you're about to email is cheaper than refreshing everything.
Common questions
Is a six-month-old list still usable?
For phones and addresses in a stable trade, largely yes. For hospitality, or for anything where you quote ratings, refresh first. When in doubt, re-scrape one zip and see how much moved.
How do I keep CRM notes when I refresh?
Match on place ID and update fields rather than replacing rows. That's the argument for keeping the ID column from the very first import — see the place ID guide.
Does re-scraping cost full price?
Yes — a refreshed business is a delivered business, at one credit. Unused reservations refund automatically, so an over-estimate on a shrinking market doesn't cost you.