How to connect Google Maps to OpenClaw

The ClawHub skill teaches OpenClaw about Google Maps, but the calls run through the ClawLink plugin and your connected account. Make sure Google Maps is connected in the dashboard, then start a fresh chat so OpenClaw reloads the tool catalog. If OpenClaw runs as a persistent gateway, restart it so the new tools register.

Reconnect Google Maps from the dashboard, then start a fresh chat if the runtime still has the old tool catalog loaded.

Google Maps tool schemas load on demand the first time a tool runs and are cached after that, so this error usually clears on its own: wait a few seconds and retry the same request. If every Google Maps call keeps failing with it in a fresh chat, reconnect from the dashboard, and contact support if it still persists — that pattern points to a configuration problem on our side, not something you can fix by reconnecting again.

Two usual causes. The connected account may not have access to the specific workspace, inbox, store, or project in the request — check that first. If access looks right, the agent may have sent a placeholder value (like "YOUR_ID" or an example id from documentation) instead of a real one: ask it to run a list or search tool first, then retry the action with a real id from those results. Most failures at this stage are one of these two, not ClawLink bugs.

First, the thing most search results get wrong for this setup: you are not being asked to fix a Google Cloud project, enable an API, or attach billing, because there is no project of yours in this path. Advice to check your key restrictions or enable the Places API is written for the key-based route. What does cause errors here is usually the request rather than the authorization. Route matrix calls are capped at 625 elements, so a large origin-by-destination grid fails with a resource-exhausted error until it is chunked into smaller batches. Requests for places that do not resolve, or coordinates outside coverage, return empty rather than erroring. If every Maps call fails rather than one shape of call, the connection itself is the thing to reconnect from the dashboard.

Ask the agent to diagnose it:

Tell me exactly which Maps tool you called and with what arguments, including how many origins and destinations if it was a route matrix. Quote the exact error. Do not retry yet.

Both are documented behaviours rather than faults, and an agent that does not know them will misreport results. The response elements are not guaranteed to arrive in the order you supplied, so results must be mapped back using the origin and destination indexes rather than by position — an agent that zips the arrays naively will attribute the wrong duration to the wrong pair. Separately, the matrix may be incomplete: only elements whose condition indicates a route exists are usable, and pairs with no viable route are present but meaningless. Ask the agent to filter on that condition and to map by index explicitly.

Ask the agent to diagnose it:

Show me the raw route matrix response. Confirm you mapped results using originIndex and destinationIndex, and tell me which pairs had no route.

Almost always ambiguity in the query rather than a failure. A place name without a city or region matches whichever candidate ranks highest globally, which is how an agent ends up reporting a restaurant on another continent. The reliable pattern is two-stage: resolve first with autocomplete or text search to get a place id, confirm the candidate is the right one, and then fetch details against that id. Note that autocomplete returns at most five predictions ordered by relevance, so a very generic query may simply not include the place you meant among them — adding a city usually fixes it immediately.

Try reconnecting Google Maps and complete the consent flow in the same browser session. Partial OAuth approvals or switching accounts mid-flow can leave the connection incomplete.

Yes. ClawLink is the fastest way to connect OpenClaw to Google Maps: link your Google Maps account once in the browser and OpenClaw can call the Google Maps API through 19 ready-made tools — no custom code or token handling.

Paste the setup prompt from this page into OpenClaw. It installs the ClawLink Google Maps skill from ClawHub, then you click Connect in the dashboard to authorize Google Maps. OpenClaw calls the tools from the next message — no config files or API keys to manage.

About two minutes. Sign in, click Connect next to Google Maps in the dashboard, authenticate, and OpenClaw can use it from the next chat message.

The alternative to ClawLink is usually manual OAuth app setup plus your own token handling, permission troubleshooting, and tool plumbing for OpenClaw. That is fine if you want to build and maintain the integration yourself. Most teams just want Google Maps working from chat.

No, and this is worth stating plainly because the most common answer to this question says otherwise. Maps Platform normally works through an API key tied to a project with a billing account, which is why guides tell you to enable the Places and Routes APIs, create a key, and restrict it. This integration authorizes over OAuth instead, so you approve access in the browser and there is no key on your side to create, restrict, or leak, and no billing account of yours attached to the calls. If you have read that a connected agent still needs its own configured project and quotas, that is accurate for the key-based route and not for this one.

Google offers its own managed paths for giving a model access to Maps data, and if Maps is the only thing your agent needs, using Google's own route is a perfectly sensible choice. The structural difference here is that these tools sit alongside every other integration you have connected, under one pairing step and one place to revoke access. That matters for the workflows that are not really about Maps — enriching a CRM record with a verified address, checking travel time before scheduling a calendar event, adding location context to a support ticket — because the agent already holds those other connections.

Geocoding is the smallest part of it. Beyond converting addresses to coordinates and back, the toolset covers place details and photos, nearby search and text search, autocomplete predictions, single routes and multi-origin route matrices, geolocation, and map imagery including 2D tiles, 3D tiles, and aerial video lookups. In practice the two most useful families for agents are place resolution — turning a vague name into a real place id with real details — and the routing tools, which answer distance and duration questions properly rather than by estimating.

The risk profile here is unusually mild compared with most integrations, because Maps is a read-oriented data service rather than something holding your private records — these tools look up places and compute routes, they do not read your mail or write to your accounts. There is no API key of yours that could leak, which removes the most common Maps-specific failure, where a key ends up in a repository and gets abused against someone's billing account. The ordinary care still applies: the connection can be revoked from the ClawLink dashboard whenever you want.

The ClawHub skill teaches OpenClaw about Google Maps, but the calls run through the ClawLink plugin and your connected account. Make sure Google Maps is connected in the dashboard, then start a fresh chat so OpenClaw reloads the tool catalog. If OpenClaw runs as a persistent gateway, restart it so the new tools register.