We re-checked 93 restaurants from a lead list. Google now marks 14 of them as permanently closed.

On 2026-10-20 we re-read the Google Maps listings of 93 busy restaurants in Subang Jaya and Petaling Jaya. All 93 came from a Google Maps lead list that showed every one of them as open. 14 of the 93 (15%) are now marked "permanently closed" by Google. The list was collected in early 2025. So this is a finding about how fast a list goes stale, not about how fast restaurants close.

01 / MethodWhat we measured

We took the restaurants our list ranked highest in four neighbouring postcode areas. We skipped chains with 5 or more outlets and overseas franchises. Then we re-read each restaurant's live Google listing, once per restaurant, using a paid service that reads Google Maps listings (Outscraper).

All 93 listings still existed. None had disappeared from Google.

02 / The catchThe list was older than its date

Our copy of the list is dated 2026-10-05. That is the day we loaded it. The listings inside it were collected in February to April 2025, about 18 months earlier.

Two things in the data agree. The restaurants that are still open had picked up a median of 132 new Google reviews since the list was made. And for 11 of the 14 closed restaurants, the newest Google review was more than six months old. Most of them were already gone long before we looked.

Think of a phone book. It does not tell you who answers TODAY. It tells you who answered on the day it was printed... and nobody prints the date on the cover.

03 / The lessonWhy this matters if you market from a list

Anyone who writes to people from a list pays for every closed door: the letter, the stamp, the call, the visit. On this list, about 1 in 7 of those would have gone to a restaurant that no longer exists. Worse, they would have gone out in our name.

The same is true of any list nobody has checked lately, including one you keep yourself.

The fix is cheap. Check the list in the week you send, not the week you buy it. We now do this before every batch.

04 / LimitsWhat this does not say

• It is not a closure rate for Malaysian restaurants. It is 93 restaurants, in one part of the Klang Valley, picked because they were busy. Busy restaurants may close less often than average, so a random list could be worse.
• "Permanently closed" is Google's label, not a site visit. We did not go and look. A restaurant that moved to a new address can show as closed at the old one. Google also accepts closure reports from the public, and some are wrong. Mistakes in the other direction exist too: a closed restaurant that nobody reported still shows as open, so 14 could be an undercount.
• One read, one day. We read each listing once, through a third-party service, not from Google directly.
• It does not say WHEN each one closed. A newest review is a hint, not a closing date.
• We did not plan this as a study. It was a step to clean a mailing list. We are reporting what that step found.

05 / Our mistakeThe failure we own

The list we use to find new customers had no "collected on" date anywhere we would see it. We read "2026-10-05" as the age of the data because that was the date on our copy. It was the age of the copy. Had we not re-read the listings, 14 letters would have gone to closed restaurants, signed by us.