Nearby places from Gmail to Google Sheets
What is around each address: the nearest pharmacy, station or supermarket, or how many cafés are within a kilometre. Ask your AI in plain English: it reads Gmail, InstaMaps does the location work, and the results land in Google Sheets.
Gmail
InstaMapsNearby places
Google Sheets
Claude
ChatGPT
Copilot
GeminiThe prompt
Find this week's emails in my Gmail labelled "Orders" and pull out each delivery address, find the nearest pharmacy to each address and how far away it is, and put the results in a new tab of this Google Sheet: <link to a sheet>.
Replace the parts in <angle brackets>.What comes back
- The nearest place of the kind you ask for, with its distance
- Or a count of places within a radius
- Anything that can't be placed or answered comes back with the reason. Nothing is dropped.
Set it up
Nearby places in Claude
Every plan, including Free. On Free, InstaMaps uses your one custom connector; Google Drive, Gmail and Google Calendar are directory connectors and don't count against it.
- In Claude, open Settings, then Connectors, and choose "Add custom connector".
- Name it InstaMaps and paste https://get-instamaps.com/mcp. Click Add.
- Click Connect and continue with Google. You land back in Claude, ready to ask.
- Add the Google Drive, Gmail or Google Calendar connector from the same Connectors page when the chain uses them.
- Paste the prompt above.
Before you start
Reading GmailConnect your AI tool's Gmail connector and label the emails you want read. The addresses pass through the chat, so keep it to a few hundred at a time.
Writing to Google SheetsInstaMaps writes to the sheet itself: share it with the address the answer gives you, as Editor. It adds new dated columns or a new tab, and never overwrites a cell.
Good to know
- Great Britain and the US, from OpenStreetMap. Everyday amenities are well covered; trades are patchier.
- The connector is free: 5,000 tool calls a day per person, and a whole sheet read by link counts as one call.
