Local business search data, without the Google Maps Platform bill

Both endpoints return the same shape of record — a list of local businesses with name, address, coordinates, rating, category, price level, phone, website, hours, and open/closed state — pulled from Google's own local search results, the same data rendered in a Local Pack. Neither endpoint returns a map: there is no tile layer, no static map image, and no route between two points.

That distinction matters because "Google Maps API alternative" searches are dominated by vendors that do render maps — Mapbox, Geoapify, Radar, MapTiler — and none of them sell this kind of business search-result data as their core product. Searlo is the reverse: a business search-result data source that happens to share a name with the product category people search for.

/search/places takes a location string — a city, an address, a named place — in the location parameter, alongside your search term in q. It's the right endpoint for a directory, a lead list, or anywhere a human typed a place name.

/search/maps takes a viewport instead — lat, lng, and zoom, or a single ll token like @40.7,-74.0,12z — because it's built for a UI that already knows where its map is centered. Pass the coordinates your map component is showing and you get results for that view, the same way panning Google Maps itself refreshes the pins.

Both return the same JSON shape (with two field-name differences — see below), so switching between them later is a parameter change, not a rewrite.

The two responses are close but not identical, because /search/places is derived from the same upstream record as /search/maps and renames a few fields along the way. Code that reads phone from a /search/places response, or phoneNumber from /search/maps, gets undefined instead of an error — check this before writing one parser for both.

Every result from either endpoint carries featureId and cid — the same identifiers the Google Reviews API accepts. Search for a business, take the featureId (or cid) off the result you want, and call /search/reviews with it to get that business's reviews without a second lookup or a name-matching step.

See the Google Reviews API for the review-side endpoint, including the one real limitation worth planning around: it returns up to 50 reviews per call, with no pagination.

Google doesn't charge one number for this. Places API (New) bills per SKU: a Text Search Pro call is $32.00 per 1,000 in the 0–100,000 tier, and if you need the rating and review count confirmed on one specific place, that's a separate Place Details Enterprise + Atmosphere call at $25.00 per 1,000 — two calls, two line items, for what one Searlo call returns. Google gives 5,000 free Text Search calls and 1,000 free Place Details calls a month; past that, every SKU you touch has its own tier table (developers.google.com/maps/billing-and-pricing/pricing, verified 2026-09-13).

Searlo charges $0.30 per 1,000 calls for either search endpoint, one field set, no SKU to pick between.

If your product needs to render an actual map — tiles, a pin at a geocoded address, or a driving-time route — Searlo is not that product. Mapbox, Geoapify, Radar, and Google's own Maps SDK do that job, and none of them are what /search/places or /search/maps compete with. What competes here is the data behind a local business search: the list of results, their contact details, and, with the Google Reviews API, what customers say about them.