Guangdong vs. Beijing: The Geography of Google Maps in China

Crawlora's companion piece on the US Google Business Profile census found Texas and New York edging out California by raw listing count, despite California's larger population. China invites the same question at a different scale: does listing density track population and economic weight the way you'd expect, or does it cluster somewhere else? We pulled the full provincial breakdown from Crawlora's Google Maps dataset to check — and the geography turns out to have two different stories depending on whether you're counting listings or looking at web presence.

Guangdong leads by a wide margin

Guangdong805,65310.9% of China

Shandong565,7467.7%

Jiangsu485,4736.6%

Zhejiang362,0774.9%

Henan337,4184.6%

Sichuan318,3914.3%

Liaoning314,4674.3%

Hebei290,9903.9%

Yunnan276,2093.7%

Chongqing270,2433.7%

Guangdong — home to Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and long the center of China's export manufacturing economy — holds nearly 1.5x the listings of second-place Shandong. The top 5 provinces (Guangdong, Shandong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Henan) combined hold 34.7% of every listing in the dataset — 2,556,367 of 7,367,951.

Japan (top 5 prefectures)31.7%Tokyo, Osaka, Saitama, Aichi, Chiba

China (top 5 provinces)34.7%Guangdong, Shandong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Henan

United States (top 5 states)35.5%Texas, New York, California, Florida, Pennsylvania

China's concentration sits almost exactly between Japan's and the US's — geographically spread across a large population and economy, but not dramatically more or less concentrated at the top than either of the other two markets we've measured this way.

Show all 31 provinces

Province	Listings	Share of China total
Guangdong	805,653	10.9%
Shandong	565,746	7.7%
Jiangsu	485,473	6.6%
Zhejiang	362,077	4.9%
Henan	337,418	4.6%
Sichuan	318,391	4.3%
Liaoning	314,467	4.3%
Hebei	290,990	3.9%
Yunnan	276,209	3.7%
Chongqing	270,243	3.7%
Heilongjiang	256,616	3.5%
Hubei	255,801	3.5%
Fujian	239,921	3.3%
Shanghai	208,187	2.8%
Hunan	207,256	2.8%
Anhui	198,491	2.7%
Gansu	188,365	2.6%
Jiangxi	185,844	2.5%
Guangxi	181,740	2.5%
Shaanxi	179,273	2.4%
Jilin	173,609	2.4%
Shanxi	170,124	2.3%
Beijing	161,109	2.2%
Xinjiang	148,916	2.0%
Guizhou	139,216	1.9%
Inner Mongolia	136,739	1.9%
Tianjin	88,579	1.2%
Hainan	61,031	0.8%
Ningxia	59,698	0.8%
Qinghai	42,437	0.6%
Tibet	30,774	0.4%

Beijing: fewer listings, far more websites

Listing count is one axis. Website coverage — already established nationally at a striking 5.0% in the companion piece on this dataset — turns out to have its own geography, and it doesn't track listing volume at all:

Beijing10.6%17,087 of 161,109

China (national)5.0%369,693 of 7,367,951

Guangdong5.5%44,533 of 805,419

Beijing ranks 23rd of 31 provinces by raw listing count — a fraction of Guangdong's volume — but its website coverage rate is roughly double both Guangdong's and the national average. The plausible explanation: Beijing's business mix skews toward corporate headquarters, government bodies, and tech-sector companies that are more likely to maintain an active web presence, versus Guangdong's much larger base of manufacturing, industrial, and small-retail listings. We don't have a category-level breakdown by province in this pass to confirm that directly, so treat it as a plausible explanation rather than a proven one — the honest finding is that listing volume and website coverage move independently here, the same kind of geography-isn't-one-dimensional result the companion Japan piece found with Tokyo, Osaka, Hokkaido, and Okinawa.

What this means

If you're prioritizing where to focus outreach or data collection in China: Guangdong's sheer volume makes it the obvious first target for scale, but Beijing's much higher website-coverage rate means a "find businesses with a website" filter will surface a meaningfully different, smaller, and more corporate set of results there than the same filter run against Guangdong's much larger pool.

If you're building on this data directly: every number in this post came from a live facet aggregation on the state field, filterable by the same country, state, and has_website parameters via datasets_google_map_search / datasets_google_map_facets. Full endpoint docs are at /docs/google-map.

Methodology & data

Every figure in this post comes from a live facet aggregation (facet=state) against Crawlora's google-map-businesses dataset, filtered to country=China, pulled July 20, 2026. Website-coverage figures for individual provinces use has_website=true combined with the relevant state filter. The facet call returns up to 50 distinct values; all 31 mainland Chinese provinces resolved as distinct buckets within that limit, alongside a small number of non-China location values (Vietnam, Myanmar, North Korea, Mongolia, South Korea, Indonesia) that read as geocoding noise, a "Hong Kong" bucket correctly kept separate from the mainland total, and a residual of records outside the top-50 buckets. We treat those as an unresolved footnote rather than smoothing them into the province totals.

This is a point-in-time crawl snapshot, not a government census — it measures what's indexed in Crawlora's Google Maps dataset, not a verified count of every business in China, and province-level counts should be read as listing density in this crawl, not authoritative business-population figures. We publish aggregate rollups only; no individual business record from this dataset is exposed in this post.

Query China's Google Maps data by province

7.3M+ China listings, filterable by province, category, rating, and website presence — all 31 mainland provinces, over one REST API.

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