sales-outscraper

What this skill does

# Outscraper Platform Help

Help the user with Outscraper platform questions — from Google Maps scraping and reviews extraction through email/contact scraping, lead enrichment, company insights, email validation, Amazon scraping, review platform scraping, geocoding, and API integration. Outscraper is a data extraction and enrichment platform that scrapes Google Maps, reviews, and 50+ internet sources. Founded in 2018 by Vlad May and Vlad Romanov, based in Bee Cave, TX. Used by 180K+ businesses.

## Step 1 — Gather context


If `references/learnings.md` exists, read it first for accumulated knowledge.

Ask the user:

1. **What area of Outscraper do you need help with?**
   - A) Google Maps scraping — search and extract business data (names, addresses, phones, ratings, hours, websites, categories)
   - B) Business Catalog — instant business database lookups by location, category, rating (pre-built database, not scraping)
   - C) Reviews extraction — Google Maps reviews, Yelp, Tripadvisor, G2, Trustpilot, Glassdoor, Capterra, App Store, Google Play
   - D) Email & contact scraping — extract emails and contact info from websites or domains
   - E) Lead enrichment — find emails, phones, social profiles for companies (Contacts & Leads)
   - F) Company insights — firmographic data, tech stack, social profiles
   - G) Email validation — verify email deliverability (valid/invalid/risky)
   - H) Amazon scraping — product data and customer reviews
   - I) Search scraping — Google Search (organic, ads, snippets, PAA), Google News
   - J) Geocoding — address validation, coordinate lookup, reverse geocoding
   - K) Integrations / API — REST API, webhooks, SDKs, Zapier, n8n, Pipedream
   - L) Account / Billing — pricing tiers, usage, free tier
   - M) Something else — describe it

2. **What's your role?**
   - A) Sales / business development
   - B) Marketing / growth
   - C) Developer / engineer
   - D) Data analyst / researcher
   - E) Agency / freelancer
   - F) Other

3. **What are you trying to accomplish?** (describe your specific goal or question)

**If the user's request already provides most of this context, skip directly to the relevant step.** Lead with your best-effort answer using reasonable assumptions (stated explicitly), then ask only the most critical 1-2 clarifying questions at the end — don't gate your response behind gathering complete context.

Note: If the user needs a specialized skill, route them there with a brief explanation of why that skill is a better fit.

## Step 2 — Route or answer directly

If the request maps to a specialized skill, route:
- General prospect list strategy / building target lists -> `/sales-prospect-list`
- Cross-platform datan enrichment strategy -> `/sales-enrich`
- Email deliverability / verification strategy (not Outscraper-specific) -> `/sales-deliverability`
- Connecting Outscraper to CRM or other tools via middleware -> `/sales-integration`
- Apollo.io-specific questions -> `/sales-apollo`
- Hunter-specific questions -> `/sales-hunter`
- Prospeo-specific questions -> `/sales-prospeo`
- Seamless.AI-specific questions -> `/sales-seamless`
- Tomba-specific questions -> `/sales-tomba`

Otherwise, answer directly from platform knowledge using the reference below.

## Step 3 — Outscraper platform reference

**Read `references/platform-guide.md`** for detailed module documentation, pricing, integrations, and data model.

*You no longer need the platform guide details — focus on the user's specific situation.*

## Step 4 — Actionable guidance

Based on the user's specific question:

1. **Scraping Google Maps businesses for a target market**:
   1. Define your search queries — use "category, location" format (e.g., "dentists, Austin, TX" or "plumbers, 90210")
   2. For large areas, split by neighborhood or zip code to stay under the 500-result-per-query cap and get more comprehensive coverage
   3. Call `GET /google-maps-search` with your query array (up to 25 queries per request)
   4. Set `limit` parameter to control how many results per query (default 20, max 500)
   5. Results include name, address, phone, website, rating, review count, hours, categories, and place_id
   6. Use place_ids from results to follow up with reviews extraction or photos extraction
   7. Deduplicate across queries if your search areas overlap — Outscraper deduplicates within a request but not across separate requests

2. **Extracting and analyzing Google Maps reviews**:
   1. Get place_ids for target businesses (either from a previous Google Maps search or by looking them up manually)
   2. Call `GET /maps/reviews-v3` with place_ids, set `sort` (newest, most_relevant, highest_rating, lowest_rating)
   3. Use `cutoff` parameter to only get reviews after a specific date — useful for ongoing monitoring
   4. Set `reviewsLimit` to cap reviews per place (controls cost for businesses with thousands of reviews)
   5. Response includes author, rating, text, date, likes, and owner reply data
   6. For sentiment analysis, export reviews and analyze trends in ratings over time, common keywords, and response patterns

3. **Building a lead list with emails and contacts**:
   1. Start with Google Maps search to find businesses in your target market — extract business names, websites, and domains
   2. Pass the extracted domains to `GET /emails-and-contacts` to scrape email addresses from company websites
   3. For deeper enrichment, use `GET /contacts-and-leads` with company names or domains to find up to 3 contacts per company with names, titles, emails, and phone numbers
   4. Validate all collected emails using `GET /email-validator` before outreach — remove invalid and risky addresses
   5. Enrich company data with `GET /company-insights` for firmographics, tech stack, and social profiles to prioritize leads by ICP fit
   6. Export the combined dataset for import into your CRM or outreach tool

4. **Setting up webhook callbacks for async results**:
   1. Most Outscraper endpoints process asynchronously — they return a request ID immediately
   2. Instead of polling `GET /requests/{id}`, add the `webhook` parameter with your callback URL
   3. When the task completes, Outscraper POSTs the results to your webhook URL
   4. Your webhook endpoint should return a 200 status quickly — process the data asynchronously on your side
   5. For integration with Zapier, use the "Task Finished" trigger to kick off downstream workflows

5. **Building a lead list from the Business Catalog**:
   1. Choose your tier: use `POST /businesses-free` (API key) for testing or small lists up to 1,000 results, or `POST /businesses` (OAuth2) for full production access
   2. Define filters: set `country_code`, `states`/`cities`/`postal_codes` for geography, `types` for business category (e.g. `["restaurant", "cafe"]`), `rating` (e.g. `"4.0+"`), `has_website: true`, `has_phone: true` to ensure contactable businesses
   3. Add enrichments in the same request: `contacts_n_leads` with `contacts_per_company` and `emails_per_contact` to get decision-maker emails, plus `company_insights` for firmographics
   4. Use `fields` array to return only the columns you need — reduces response size and speeds up processing
   5. Paginate with `cursor` — each response includes `next_cursor` and `has_more`. Loop until `has_more` is false
   6. Results are instant (no async polling needed) — the catalog is a pre-built database, not a scraping job
   7. Validate enriched emails via `GET /email-validator` on the scraping API before outreach

6. **Using the Python SDK**:
   1. Install: `pip install outscraper`
   2. Initialize: `from outscraper import ApiClient; client = ApiClient(api_key='YOUR_KEY')`
   3. Google Maps search: `results = client.google_maps_search('restaurants, NYC', limit=100)`
   4. Reviews: `reviews = client.google_maps_reviews('place_id_here', reviews_limit=50, sort='newest')`
   5. Email validation: `results = client.emails_validator(['[email protected]'])`
   6. All SDK metho