The next generation of Autocomplete is now available in Preview, offering seamless integration with Address Validation, more intuitive pricing, and support for expanded place types from the new Places API. It’s available to all developers at no cost during Preview. Autocomplete builds on our recent launch of the new Places API, which offers new features in Text Search, Place Details and Photos, and Nearby Search, to make it easier for you to surface helpful information about the world in the products you build.

What sets apart Google’s Autocomplete

With Autocomplete, you can help your users quickly find the exact place they’re looking for by automatically suggesting businesses and points of interest as they type. Autocomplete utilizes the speed of Google Search to quickly search and suggest addresses from one of the most accurate and comprehensive models of the world, with over 50 million daily updates and coverage in more than 250 countries and territories. In addition to our extensive address data, Autocomplete helps you bring rich location data for over 250 million places to your users, including opening hours, price levels, user ratings, and much more.

Improvements to the next generation Autocomplete

Seamless integration with Address Validation

Global ecommerce this year will reach almost $6 trillion dollars in sales.¹ But ecommerce growth can be challenged, in part due to complications with checkout. In fact, 70% of all online shopping carts are abandoned². There are also challenges with fulfillment. According to a recent survey, 71% of surveyed shoppers have contacted customer service due to shipping and/or delivery issues regarding online orders³ . To address this, we’ve created a new Autocomplete with Address Validation product that helps you decrease cart abandonment, increase customer repeat rate, and delight customers with faster checkout. It also helps you drive operational efficiencies by catching and fixing address errors earlier in the process to make faster deliveries, save costs, and avoid customer churn due to incorrect deliveries. At a CPM of $25 per 1,000 sessions, this product also provides significant cost savings when compared to using the new Autocomplete and Address Validation APIs separately, which is a CPM of $32 per 1,000 sessions.

Supports expanded place types from new Places API

The next generation Autocomplete supports all of the expanded place types from the new Places API. Places API now provides even more details and place types, which means your users will be able to find detailed information about places of interest by type, such as best sushi or nearby hiking areas. With the new Places API, we’ve nearly doubled the number of supported place types since the previous version. Now there are nearly 200 place types including coffee shops, playgrounds, EV charging stations, and more. You’ll also be able to provide updated accessibility information for places, including wheelchair-accessible seating, restrooms, and parking.

Simpler and more intuitive pricing

We’ve changed our pricing to make it simpler, more intuitive, and better match how your users use Autocomplete. For example, sometimes your users don't always finish their checkout, or they can select a pickup point and they accidentally close their browser. With the new Autocomplete session-based pricing, if your user doesn't complete their session (e.g. they enter a single character in your search box and then close their browser), you will only be charged for an Autocomplete request instead of a full session with Address Validation or Place Details.

We now offer three Autocomplete SKUs that line up to the most common use cases

1. Checkout and delivery–the Autocomplete with Address Validation product is designed for e-commerce use cases. It helps you provide a seamless checkout and frictionless fulfillment experience, helping drive more revenue and an enhanced customer experience.
2. Discover new places–the Autocomplete with Place Details Preferred product is ideal for when you want to help users not only find places, but discover more about those places with rich place details–such as opening hours, user ratings and reviews, and price levels–to make decisions about where to go.
3. Find the exact place a user is looking for–the Autocomplete with Place Details Location product can be used to help users quickly find the exact place they’re looking for by automatically suggesting addresses, businesses and points of interest as they type, and then showing the chosen location on a Google map.

New Google Cloud service infrastructure

Like the other products offered with the new Places API, the new Autocomplete offers modern security settings with OAuth-based authentication and is built on Google Cloud’s service infrastructure to give you even more peace of mind as you build with us. This provides an alternative to API key-based authentication of requests to the new Places API, which are still supported.

Get started with next generation Autocomplete

Try out the next generation Autocomplete at no cost during the Preview phase. To learn more, check out the documentation and the updated pricing. To learn more about the new Places API, check out our webpage and documentation.

To get started with the next generation Autocomplete, ensure "Places API (New)” is enabled on your Google Cloud project. If you are using the Place Autocomplete web service, follow the link to the docs to learn how to update your API call to the next generation of Autocomplete. If you are calling Place Autocomplete via our Maps JavaScript API, or Android, or iOS SDKs, we will be launching the next generation Autocomplete on these platforms in the coming months.

We'd love to see what you're creating with the next generation Autocomplete and Places API, so be sure to tag us at @GMapsPlatform on X and #GoogleMapsPlatform on YouTube and LinkedIn. We can’t wait to see what you build.

Sources

1. eMarketer, March 2023
2. Baymard Institute, 2023
3. UPS Capital, April 2023