Turn a Google Maps link into a GPX track.

A directions link is a list of places to pass through. It holds the origin, the stops, the destination, and the travel mode — and, when you drag the blue line, the hidden points Google added to pin down the shape. What it never holds is the route itself: there is no road geometry in the link, only the stops.

That is a documented limit of the address people share, not a bug in this tool. The link format Google publishes for developers caps a route at nine waypoints (three on mobile browsers):

Everything below that line — the exact streets, the turns, the distances — is worked out again by whoever reads the link. So the honest description of this page is: it reads the stops, and it can ask a routing service to draw the road between them.

Rebuilding is a second thing that happens the moment a link is read. The link itself never leaves your device; two requests do. The stops go to a public FOSSGIS routing server running on OpenStreetMap data, and the answer comes back as a track that follows roads — and, as on every page here, elevation for the profile arrives from AWS terrain tiles. Because a different routing service makes its own decisions between your points, it can pick a different street than Google did — for a car that can mean a motorway instead of a side street.

So the page shows you the trade instead of hiding it: the length along roads, the length point to point, and how far the rebuilt line strays from the straight line between your stops. If a number looks wrong, add a stop where the line went astray and press rebuild again.

Google's own distance and duration are not in the link, so they cannot be compared here. Anyone showing you a "Google" distance from a pasted link is showing you their own routing service's number.

A dense line is cut down to its bends before it goes out. Routing through every point you drew sounds more faithful, but it is not: when the points sit a few metres apart, one-way streets and turn restrictions make the routing service double back on itself. On a 4.2 km Paris line, routing through all 177 of those hidden points produced 20.9 km; through the ten bends that matter, 4.5 km. The bends you drew are the first thing it keeps: your edits survive unless they sit almost on top of the line.

• Driving, cycling, walking, two-wheeler. Rebuilt along roads, using the same kind of travel. A link usually says which mode it is — change the Drive / Bike / Walk buttons and the line is rebuilt for that mode straight away. If the link says nothing, the rebuild starts on driving.
• Transit. Not rebuilt. Buses and trains do not follow roads, and Google does not publish the line they take. The stops are still imported, and the GPX still works as a list of points.
• Flight. Not rebuilt, for the same reason.

A Google Maps link often starts at an address. Reading it — the stops, the travel mode, the hidden points — happens in this page, in your browser. No link, coordinate, or route name is stored by Map to GPS.

Following the roads is the one thing that leaves your browser, and it happens as soon as a link with two or more stops is read: those stops go to FOSSGIS, which runs the routing software. Nothing else about you goes with them, and editing the line afterwards sends nothing until you ask for another rebuild. Short links (maps.app.goo.gl, goo.gl) need one hop to reveal the route: reading one passes that link through our server on its way to Google, once, and nothing is logged or kept. Map tiles and place search need their own requests, as they do everywhere on this site.

• Google My Maps. A My Maps link is a map document, not a route. My Maps exports KML or KMZ, so take that file to the GPX and KML converter instead.
• Links that are only a place id. A cid= link holds no coordinate at all; open the place in Maps and copy the address bar.
• Bulk conversion. One link at a time, in your browser. There is no queue, no account, and no server holding your routes.
• Anything but GPX 1.1 on the way out. A single track, ready for a Garmin, a phone app, or another tool.

The waypoint limits, the accepted parameter values, and the routing-service conditions are taken from the pages below, checked on 23 September 2026.