This service lets you find out the Google Place IDs of the stack of regions/territories that contain a given place. For any given Google Places place you provide, we will return back the locality, administrative regions (country, state/province etc.) and country it belongs to.*

This is useful if you are either allowing a user to input a place and you want to automatically structure it by global territory (ie: country/state) – or want to organize your own place information into global territories. The default Google Places SDK returns only the human-readable addresses of the containing regions for a place, but does not match them with their logical place IDs of any region. Having the IDs lets you link places logically to regions as well as look up subsequent info about the regions beyond their human-readable name.

*Note that not all countries have support globally. You can see the full list and which region types are supported here: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/dds-boundaries/coverage#coverage-legend