Google Fusion Tables: what happened, and why it shut down

Google Fusion Tables was a free web service, launched on 9 June 2009 out of Google Research, that let anyone upload a table of data, join it with other tables and visualise it as a map, chart, timeline or network graph. It became a standard tool in data journalism and in classrooms because it turned a column of addresses into a working map in a few clicks. Google announced its retirement in December 2018 and switched it off on 3 December 2019.

Timeline [edit]

2009

9 June 2009 Launch

Fusion Tables launches

Upload a table, get a map.

2012

2012 Peak

A standard tool in data journalism and classrooms

2018

11 December 2018 Shutdown announced

Google announces the turndown

2019

3 December 2019 Shutdown

Fusion Tables and its API stop

Embedded maps stop loading.

The site through time

Browse fusiontables.google.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Google announced on 11 December 2018 that Fusion Tables and its API would be turned down on 3 December 2019, pointing users at Google Sheets, Data Studio, BigQuery and the Maps Platform instead, and offering a tool to download tables. None of the replacements did the same job in one place.

Our analysis: Fusion Tables was a research project that escaped the lab and became infrastructure for people Google was not thinking about: local newsrooms, school geography departments, small charities. You uploaded a spreadsheet with a column of addresses and got a working map with clickable points, for free, without writing code or holding a credit card. Its replacements are each better at one part and all worse at the whole, and several of them bill by usage, which is exactly the barrier Fusion Tables removed. It was killed for the usual reason: nobody at Google owned it, and it did not fit the cloud products that did have owners.

History [edit]

A spreadsheet with a map in it

Fusion Tables arrived on 9 June 2009 from Google Research, and its trick was to sit exactly between a spreadsheet and a database. You uploaded a table, it geocoded a column of place names or addresses, and it produced a map with a pin for every row, hosted, shareable and embeddable in a page with two lines of markup. It could also draw charts, timelines and network graphs, and it could merge your table with someone else's on a shared column, which is how open data portals ended up publishing Fusion Table links.

That combination made it the default tool for a particular kind of work. Newsroom developers used it for election results and crime maps, councils used it for bin collection zones, teachers used it because it needed no installation and no budget. For a decade, a large share of the amateur maps on the web were Fusion Tables in an iframe.

Retired without a replacement

Google never really staffed it. The interface stayed as it was, the geocoding limits stayed tight, and it sat outside the cloud products that were being sold to companies. On 11 December 2018 Google announced the turndown: the service and its API would stop on 3 December 2019, with a downloader for your tables and a list of suggested alternatives, Sheets for small data, BigQuery for large, Data Studio for charts, the Maps Platform for maps.

Each of those does part of the job. None of them takes a schoolteacher from a list of addresses to a shareable map in five minutes without an invoice, which is why the shutdown left thousands of embedded maps on the web as grey rectangles.

The domain today

fusiontables.google.com is gone. The maps it produced no longer load, and the pages that embedded them show an empty frame.

Sources [edit]

Last verified: 20 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).

Google Fusion Tables