GMPlus is two companies wearing one domain. Open gmplus.io today and you land on a browser-based Google Maps extractor that hands you 500 free credits a day, 27 export fields and a hosted Model Context Protocol server your AI agent can call directly. Click through to the product the brand was actually built on — the ChatGPT-powered Gmail writing assistant still headlined “#1 AI Email Generator” — and the “Add to Chrome” button points at an extension that Google no longer serves.
That gap is the story, and it is bigger than one stale button. The marketing page for the email generator still advertises a 4.69 / 5 Chrome Store rating, 40,000+ weekly active users and a #5 Product Hunt daily ranking for software you cannot install from either store it names. Meanwhile the part of GMPlus that is being actively developed — the sitemap shows the Maps MCP page updated on 31 August 2026 and the Outscraper comparison on 1 September — is aimed squarely at agents rather than people.
We have written before about the plumbing this depends on, including enterprise-managed auth for Claude MCP connectors and why agents that pass authentication can still drift or leak data. This article is a close reading of GMPlus as it exists in September 2026: what the tool genuinely does well, what its own published benchmark actually shows, where its credit arithmetic bites, what happened to the extension, and the terms-of-service question every buyer should ask before pointing an agent at it.
Table of contents
- What GMPlus Actually Is in September 2026
- The GMPlus AI Email Generator That No Longer Exists
- Inside the GMPlus Google Maps Scraper MCP Server
- What the Free Credits Actually Buy You
- The GMPlus vs Outscraper Test, Read Carefully
- Where the Extractor Sits Against Google’s Own Terms
- Who Should Use This Tool, and Who Should Not
- Frequently Asked Questions About GMPlus
- References
What GMPlus Actually Is in September 2026
GMPlus describes itself on its about page as a team making “publicly available Google Maps business information easier to collect, organize, and use.” The named people are Feng Li (Founder and CEO), Xiaofei (CTO) and Joshua Adams (Frontend Developer). Notably, that page does not mention email writing at all. The company’s own account of itself is now entirely a business-data story.
The six products under one brand
The product menu lists six tools, one of which is unreleased and one of which is the reason an AI blog is writing about a lead-generation utility.
| GMPlus product | What it does | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Google Maps Extractor | Search by keyword, category and location; export structured business records | Live, flagged “Most Popular” |
| Google Maps Email Scraper | Finds available emails on public pages linked from a listing | Live |
| Google Maps Reviews Scraper | Pulls review counts and related listing data | Live |
| Google Maps Scraper MCP | Hosted MCP server exposing the extractor to AI clients | Live, updated 31 Aug 2026 |
| Bing Maps Scraper | Same workflow against Bing Maps listings | Live |
| Apple Maps Extractor | Announced equivalent for Apple Maps | Coming Soon |
The core workflow is deliberately narrow: type a keyword, pick a country and up to ten cities or areas, choose whether you want emails, run the task, export CSV, XLSX or JSON. There is no browser extension to install, no Google Maps API key to configure and no code to write. A second input mode, labelled “AI Prompt” and badged NEW, lets you describe the businesses you want in plain language instead of filling the form — category, minimum rating, whether a website exists, and so on.
The 27 fields you actually get
The field list is the honest measure of a scraper, and the vendor publishes its own in full: business name, phone, available email, website, public social links, full address, categories, average rating, review count, opening hours, Google Maps URL, Place ID, domain, street, city or locality, claimed status, price information, Plus Code, latitude, longitude, featured image, CID, total photos, contributor URL, booking URL, feature ID and price level.
That is a genuinely broad record for a free tier, and the identifiers matter more than they look. Place ID and CID are the join keys that let a dataset from GMPlus be reconciled against anything else you hold, which is what separates a usable table from a screenshot of one. If your end state is a data mining or market-mapping exercise rather than a one-off list, those two columns are the ones to check for first.
The GMPlus AI Email Generator That No Longer Exists
The email generator is where GMPlus started, and it is the part of the site that has not been maintained. The live page still promises “Free forever. No credit card required,” 100+ AI-generated prompts, custom template storage, multilingual output and a toggle to switch the assistant off inside Gmail. It carries four proof points: a #5 Product Hunt daily ranking, a Chrome Store rating of 4.69 / 5, 40,000+ weekly active users and “Trusted by Over 10,000 Enterprises in the World.”
What the extension listings say now
The page’s “Add to Chrome” link resolves to extension ID abekedpmkgndeflcidpkkddapnjnocjp, listed as “Open AI ChatGPT for Email – GMPlus” and published under the developer name social_analyzer. Third-party tracker Chrome-Stats records that listing as removed from the Chrome Web Store on 1 June 2026 for a Chrome Web Store policy violation, with a final snapshot of 30,000 users and a 4.16 rating from 83 reviews. Its last version, 2.0.21, shipped on 25 January 2025 — roughly seventeen months before the removal, and more than nineteen months ago now.
We checked that independently rather than taking a tracker at its word. Google’s own extension update service, the endpoint Chrome itself calls to fetch a CRX, returns 204 No Content for the GMPlus extension ID while returning 200 for two control extensions requested the same way. A 204 there means Google is not serving that extension to anyone. The Microsoft Edge add-on the same page links to, CRX ID dkmalckeflhneannkdlembledmmjdfjo, behaves the same way: the Edge Add-ons product-details API answers Status Code: 404; Not Found, while the same API returns a full record for uBlock Origin. Both stores agree.
| Claim on the live product page | What the store data shows |
|---|---|
| Chrome Store Rating 4.69 / 5 | 4.16 from 83 ratings at final snapshot |
| 40,000+ Weekly Active Users | 30,000 total users at final snapshot |
| Add to Chrome | Update service returns 204; extension not served |
| Also on Microsoft Edge | Edge product-details API returns 404 |
| Last updated (not stated) | Version 2.0.21, 25 January 2025 |
A second, smaller Gmail extension under the same brand — “GMPlus – Open AI Chat GPT For Gmail,” published by Tgplus with 2,866 users and a 3.00 rating — is also recorded as obsolete. There is no live replacement under that brand in either store.
Why this matters beyond one dead link
Google does not publish the reason a specific extension was pulled, and the Chrome Web Store program policies cover a wide range: user privacy and limited data use, deceptive installation or marketing, minimum functionality, spam, and technical requirements including the Manifest V3 migration. Reviews summarised on the tracker skew toward reliability complaints and objections that a “free” tool gated features behind paid plans. None of that identifies the actual cause, and it would be wrong to guess.
What is fair to say is narrower and more useful. A vendor page that markets an unavailable product with numbers that do not match its own store record is a maintenance signal, and maintenance signals are the cheapest due-diligence data you get. If you are assessing GMPlus, assess the Maps extractor and the MCP server. Treat the email generator as discontinued regardless of what the page says.
Inside the GMPlus Google Maps Scraper MCP Server
The MCP server is the genuinely interesting piece, and it is why GMPlus belongs in a conversation about agent tooling rather than a list of scraping utilities. It is a remote server speaking Streamable HTTP, the transport defined in the Model Context Protocol specification, so nothing is installed locally. You add a URL and a token, and your agent gains two tools: search businesses, and fetch results.
How the MCP connection is made
Authentication is a bearer token — your API key, copied from the dashboard settings page, sent in the Authorization header. The endpoint is https://gmplus.io/mcp for every client. The vendor publishes ready-made snippets for four:
| Client | Where the config lives | Shape |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Code | One CLI command | claude mcp add --transport http plus an Authorization header |
| Claude Desktop | MCP server settings | Server URL plus MCP token |
| Cursor | .cursor/mcp.json or ~/.cursor/mcp.json | JSON object with url and headers |
| Codex | ~/.codex/config.toml | TOML block with type = "http" and http_headers |
| VS Code | MCP-enabled assistant settings | Same URL and token pair |
The example prompts the vendor publishes are a good guide to the intended shape of a task: find ten plumbers in Dallas that have a website and return valid JSON; get restaurants in New York City rated above 3; return the website, phone, rating and review count for thirty coffee shops in Portland. These are list-building requests with a filter attached, which is exactly what two tools and a structured record can serve.
What two tools does and does not buy you
Two tools is a deliberately small surface, and that is mostly a virtue. The failure modes of agent tooling scale with the number of ways a model can be wrong about which tool to call, so a server that only searches and only fetches is easy to reason about. It is also easy to budget, which matters when the same account credits fund both the web app and the agent.
The limits are equally clear. There is no traditional REST API positioned as the primary developer path — the vendor says a paid API plan is arranged by email — so an application integration is a conversation rather than a signup. And an agent that can query a Maps dataset is only as useful as the guardrails around what it then does with 500 business records. That is a point we have made about autonomous AI agents generally: the retrieval step is rarely the risky one.
What the Free Credits Actually Buy You
The pricing model is the clearest thing on the site, and it deserves credit for that. Every GMPlus account gets 500 free credits per day, refreshed daily rather than granted once. A standard business record costs 1 credit. A record with email extraction selected costs 5.
Turning email extraction on therefore cuts your daily ceiling by 80%. That single decision is the whole cost model, and the vendor’s own test confirms it: 100 email-enabled records consumed exactly 500 credits, the entire day’s allowance.
The credit arithmetic worth doing before you start
| Task | Credits | Days on the free tier |
|---|---|---|
| 200 businesses, no emails | 200 | Same day |
| 500 businesses, no emails | 500 | Same day, exactly |
| 100 businesses with emails | 500 | Same day, exactly |
| 500 businesses with emails | 2,500 | Five days |
| 2,000 businesses, no emails | 2,000 | Four days |
The practical read is that GMPlus is generous for repeated small jobs and slow for one large one. A team mapping a single city’s restaurant sector by category, a few hundred records at a time, will never pay. A team that needs 5,000 enriched records this week is looking at 25,000 credits, which the free tier cannot supply — and the paid route is an email to the vendor rather than a published price. If the answer to “what does this cost at volume?” is not on the pricing page, treat that as a procurement question, not a detail.
The GMPlus vs Outscraper Test, Read Carefully
On 1 September 2026 GMPlus published a comparison against Outscraper, based on a test it says it ran in August. It deserves reading, partly because the numbers are specific and partly because it is more candid than vendor benchmarks usually are — it reports losing on the metric most buyers care about.
What the vendor’s own numbers show
Both tools were asked for 100 dentists in Chicago with contact enrichment enabled. GMPlus ran with email extraction on; Outscraper ran with Leads and Contacts Enrichment only.
| Metric | GMPlus | Outscraper |
|---|---|---|
| Unique businesses returned | 100 | 100 |
| With phone numbers | 100 | 100 |
| With websites | 95 | 100 |
| With at least one email | 33 | 74 |
| Export rows | 100 | 185 |
| Full task time | Under 1 minute | Over 1 hour in this run |
| Export formats | CSV / XLSX / JSON | CSV / Excel / JSON / Parquet |
Field coverage in the result set makes the shape of the product obvious at a glance.
The caveats the vendor states, and the one it does not
The comparison flags three limitations itself, and they are real. The two platforms did not return the same 100 businesses, so 33% against 74% is not a controlled head-to-head on identical records. Outscraper was displaying a Partial Service Degradation notice during the enrichment run, so the hour-plus figure should not be read as its normal speed. And the row counts measure different things — 185 rows covered 100 companies because Outscraper returns multiple contacts per business.
The caveat it does not state is the framing one: this is a comparison published by the winner, on a task the winner chose, against a competitor configured by the winner. Reporting an unflattering email-coverage result buys real credibility, and the 33% figure is a useful planning number in its own right — expect roughly a third of Maps businesses to yield an email through GMPlus. But a vendor benchmark is evidence about a vendor’s claims, not an independent measurement, and the honest way to use it is to reproduce the search that matters to you on both free tiers.
Where the Extractor Sits Against Google's Own Terms
This is the part most reviews of tools like this skip, and it is the part that decides whether the tool is usable inside a company with a compliance function.
What Google’s terms actually say
The Google Maps Platform Terms of Service are explicit. Section 3.2.3(a), headed “No Scraping,” states that a customer “will not export, extract, or otherwise scrape Google Maps Content for use outside the Services,” and gives as examples that the customer will not “pre-fetch, index, store, reshare, or rehost Google Maps Content outside the services” or “copy and save business names, addresses, or user reviews.”
Section 3.2.3(c)(vii) goes further in a way that lands directly on the MCP use case: a customer will not use Google Maps Content “to improve machine learning and artificial intelligence models, including to train, test, validate or fine-tune the models.” Those clauses bind Google Maps Platform customers rather than every visitor to google.com/maps, and GMPlus does not use a Maps Platform API key. But the direction of travel is unambiguous, and anyone building a repeatable pipeline on scraped listing data should read the clauses before, not after.
What the vendor’s terms put on you
The company’s Terms and Conditions, last updated 20 August 2026, are candid about where responsibility sits. Section E states that you are responsible for using GMPlus “and any data obtained through the Service in accordance with applicable laws, regulations, and third-party terms,” and that GMPlus “is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Google.” That is a clean disclosure, and it also means the third-party-terms question is contractually yours.
There is a wrinkle worth noting without overstating it. Section C(3) has every user warrant that they “will not access the Site through automated or non-human means, whether through a bot, script or otherwise” — boilerplate that predates a product whose entire premise is an AI agent calling a hosted endpoint. Agent access through the official MCP server is plainly sanctioned by GMPlus; the clause has simply not caught up with the roadmap. Legal boilerplate that contradicts the product is a small thing, but it is the kind of small thing that stalls a procurement review.
The data-protection layer nobody escapes
Business contact data is still personal data when it identifies a person, and a scraped email at a two-partner dental practice frequently does. Collecting it changes your obligations: lawful basis, transparency to people you have never contacted, retention, and the right to object to direct marketing. The cybersecurity dimension is separate and equally real — a CSV of 500 enriched business contacts sitting in a shared drive is a breach waiting for a misconfigured permission. If the output is heading into a CRM or a campaign tool, treat it as a controlled dataset from the moment it is exported, not once someone notices.
Who Should Use This Tool, and Who Should Not
Where the extractor is the right call
GMPlus fits a specific shape of job well. If your task genuinely starts and ends with Google Maps, if you want a structured business list rather than a contact-enrichment pipeline, if a recurring daily allowance suits your cadence better than a one-off free trial, and if one row per business is the output you want to filter and sort, this is a well-judged tool. The MCP server extends that to agent workflows cleanly, and 500 free locations a day is a real allowance rather than a teaser.
Local market research, competitor mapping by category and city, supplier discovery, and finding which businesses in a sector lack a website are all served properly by 27 fields and a fast export. The AI Prompt mode makes the first of those noticeably quicker.
Where you should look elsewhere
If contact depth is the objective — multiple named contacts per company, job titles, validated emails — the vendor’s own test says Outscraper returned more than twice the email coverage in its result set. If you need Parquet, GMPlus does not offer it. If a conventional REST API is central to an application you are building, an emailed enterprise arrangement is a weaker proposition than published API docs. And if your compliance function needs a defensible answer on Google’s terms before data lands in a CRM, that answer has to come from your own legal review, because the vendor’s own terms explicitly hand the question back to you.
| If you need… | Verdict |
|---|---|
| A fast structured Maps business list | Strong fit |
| Maps data inside an agent workflow | Strong fit via the hosted MCP server |
| Deep multi-contact enrichment | Weak fit; coverage was 33% in the vendor test |
| Published volume pricing | Not available; contact sales |
| A Gmail AI writing assistant | No; the extension is delisted |
The GEO detail worth stealing
One last observation, aimed at anyone doing this kind of marketing rather than buying it. GMPlus publishes an llms.txt file at its root: a plain-language fact sheet stating the credit costs, the field count, the export formats and the caveat that not every listing carries every field, written specifically so that a language model summarising the product gets it right. Whatever you conclude about the rest of the site, that is a company thinking clearly about how AI systems read it — and it is a tactic worth copying, as we cover in our AI models and tools hub.
Frequently Asked Questions About GMPlus
Is GMPlus free?
The Google Maps extractor has a free tier of 500 credits per day, refreshed daily. A standard record costs 1 credit and a record with email extraction costs 5, so the free ceiling is 500 standard records or 100 email-enabled records per day. Paid plans exist but are not published; the MCP page directs paid API enquiries to email.
Does GMPlus need a browser extension?
No. The current Maps workflow runs entirely in the browser with no extension, no Google Maps API key and no code. This is a change from the company’s original product, which was a Gmail extension.
Can Claude or Cursor use GMPlus directly?
Yes. GMPlus hosts a remote MCP server at https://gmplus.io/mcp using Streamable HTTP, authenticated with your API key as a bearer token. It exposes two tools and publishes configuration snippets for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code and Codex.
What happened to the GMPlus email generator?
Its Chrome extension is no longer distributed — Google’s update service returns no content for the extension ID, and the linked Edge add-on returns 404 from the Edge Add-ons API. Chrome-Stats records removal on 1 June 2026 for a policy violation. The GMPlus marketing page for the product is still live and still links to both stores.
Is scraping Google Maps with GMPlus legal?
That depends on your jurisdiction, your purpose and your own legal advice. Google Maps Platform terms prohibit scraping and caching Maps Content, and the vendor’s terms explicitly make compliance with third-party terms and applicable law the user’s responsibility. Personal data obtained this way also falls under data-protection law.
How accurate is the GMPlus vs Outscraper comparison?
The figures are specific and the caveats are stated, but it was published by GMPlus, on a task it chose, with the competitor configured by the same vendor. The two runs did not return identical businesses and Outscraper was in a degraded state. Use it as a planning input and reproduce the search that matters to you.
References
More AI coverage: explore Progressive Robot's AI Models, Tools & Releases hub — hands-on reviews, setup guides and benchmarks in one place.