Platform flexibility has a running cost
Automation platforms are excellent when your workflow is genuinely bespoke. The trade-off is that every agent is a small piece of software you now own: it needs inputs, it breaks when the target changes, and someone has to notice when it silently returns nothing. For a recurring monthly territory pull, that overhead is larger than the task.
Official API versus automated browsing
FindLeadly calls the Google Places API with our own key. The practical consequences: no blocking, no proxy management, no account of yours exposed, and a consistent field schema every time. Scraped output can be richer in edge cases and is less predictable in ordinary ones — how the extraction works goes into the detail.
The filters are the product
Raw extraction gives you a list. What makes it a lead list is the qualification: which of these has no website, which has eleven reviews after six years, which is rated 4.9 and invisible. Those filters run inside the search here rather than in a spreadsheet afterwards, which is most of the time saved.