Frequently Asked Questions

Can Google Maps do route planning?

You can plan a route of up to 10 stops in Google Maps. It's a good, free choice for short driving, biking or walking routes. You can work in batches to plan longer routes. If you’re a delivery business or delivery driver, our recommended method for longer routes is laid out in our Google Maps Route Planner for Deliveries post.

Does Google Maps have a route planner?

Yes, Google Maps can be used as a route planner. However, it does not come with route optimization, meaning that you need to sort the sequence of your multi-stop route yourself. Google Maps also doesn't support multiple routes.

Routific is purpose-built route planning software for delivery businesses that comes with route optimization for your entire fleet. Your drivers can still use Google Maps for navigation with real-time traffic data.

How do I add more than 10 stops on Google Maps?

Google Maps is designed to work with up to 10 stops at a time. But there’s a clever hack you can use to add more than 10 stops. Basically, you make a couple of ten-stop routes and then combine their URLs to see them all listed on a single map. But this won’t give you an efficient or optimized route — you will still have to create an efficient route sequence yourself (or use the Routific for Google Maps Chrome extension).

How does Google Maps plan a route?

When you ask Google Maps to show the best route from A to B, here’s what happens behind the scenes:

  1. Google looks at the addresses you give it and finds their latitude and longitude coordinates (this is called geocoding). Then it puts two markers on the map at these coordinates.
  2. Google identifies all the possible road segments between your two points.
  3. Then it scores those road segments based on factors like the shortest distance, the length of connecting road segments, and the traffic conditions at the time of the day.
  4. It returns you the highest scoring route, and some runner-up alternatives.

And it all happens faster than you can read this sentence — amazing!

There’s more complexity to its algorithm, but you can trust Google Maps to do two things:

  1. Give you a very good path from your current location to your destination.
  2. Provide an impressively accurate Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA). When Google released the Android operating system for mobile devices, it began capturing real time traffic and location data from its users. That has made its travel time calculations accurate beyond anything we’ve known before. 

So if you’re looking for the shortest path between two stops, then Google Maps is a fantastic navigation app.