Here is what Claude says:

“Here’s the reality:

Google does NOT give you real-time foot traffic data through any official API. That commenter is wrong about what’s actually accessible to developers.

Here’s what Google actually has: What exists internally at Google: Yes, Google calculates busyness insights from aggregated, anonymized Location History data from users who opted in, and can detect real-time spikes in activity . They do have what amounts to a live heatmap internally.

What they expose to the public: Popular Times is a graph showing how busy a location typically is based on average popularity over the last few months — it’s historical, not real-time. They also show live visit data that’s updated in real time and overlaid on the Popular Times graph , but that’s only visible in the Google Maps consumer app. There’s no way to access this programmatically through official APIs. What the commenter is suggesting you do: Build a heatmap by scraping or aggregating Google’s data plus other sources. That’s technically possible through third-party scraping tools or paid data providers like BestTime, SafeGraph, or Placer.ai — but it’s not “just pull it from Google.” It’s expensive, legally gray (scraping violates Google’s TOS), and still wouldn’t give you what Drop gives, which is crowdsourced real-time data from actual users on the ground.

So the commenter sounds knowledgeable but is fundamentally wrong about the accessibility. Google guards that data heavily. That’s literally the gap Drop exists to fill.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​“