Gelbe Seiten Scraper — German Business Directory

Pay-per-result: $2.00/1K businesses (phone + GPS coordinates included). No proxy. No monthly fee.

Gelbe Seiten is Germany's largest business directory with 3M+ listings. Get phone, full address, GPS coordinates, opening hours, and website for any local business category in any German city — no proxy needed.

Scrape Gelbe Seiten (gelbeseiten.de), Germany's largest business directory, for any category and city. Returns complete contact data including phone numbers, full addresses, GPS coordinates, websites, and business category — no proxy required.

What you get

Field	Description	Coverage
name	Business display name	100%
phone	Phone number (German format)	~85%
street	Street address	~90%
postalCode	5-digit postal code	~90%
city	City name	~90%
lat / lng	GPS coordinates	~80%
website	Business website URL	~60%
categoryType	Schema.org type (e.g. Electrician, Restaurant)	~75%
detailUrl	Canonical Gelbe Seiten listing URL	100%
paymentAccepted	Payment methods	~40%
openingHours	Opening hours array	~50%
description	Business description	~50%
parse_confidence	Parse quality score (0.0–1.0)	100%

Why this beats the competition

	This actor	Other directory scrapers
GPS coordinates (lat/lng)	Yes — 80%+ coverage	No
Phone from JSON-LD (no click-reveal)	Yes	Often blocked
Opening hours	Yes	Rarely
Payment methods	Yes	No
No proxy needed	Yes	Usually requires proxy
parse_confidence	Yes	No
Price	$2.00/1K	$3-5/1K

• Phone in JSON-LD — no click-to-reveal, no obfuscation. Phone is directly in application/ld+json schema data.
• GPS coordinates — latitude + longitude for every listing that has it (80%+). Competitor actors return street only. Map all electricians in Berlin to find coverage gaps — GPS enables spatial analysis no other directory actor supports.
• parse_confidence — every record ships a parse_confidence score (0.0–1.0). Below 0.7 is a machine-readable signal that the page structure has drifted — your data pipeline can filter automatically.
• No proxy needed — Gelbe Seiten serves clean HTML from Apify cloud IPs. Zero COGS.

How it works

1. GET /suche/<category>/<city> → initial HTML with ~50 business UUIDs
2. POST /ajaxsuche (position offset) → paginate remaining results (up to 500+ for large cities)
3. GET /gsbiz/<uuid> → detail page with application/ld+json LocalBusiness schema
4. Extract: name, phone, address, GPS, website, type → push + charge per result

Input

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
category	string	"elektriker"	German business category keyword
city	string	"berlin"	City to search
maxItems	integer	50	Max results (0 = all available)

Category examples: elektriker, arzt, restaurant, bäcker, friseur, zahnarzt, klempner, maler, steuerberater, anwalt

Pricing example

Pay-per-result (PPE). Each business record = one event charge.

Run size	Cost
100 businesses	$0.20
500 businesses	$1.00
1,000 businesses	$2.00
5,000 businesses	$10.00

No proxy subscription needed — Gelbe Seiten serves clean data without blocking. Zero COGS to the buyer beyond Apify platform usage.

Output sample

{
  "name": "Elektriker Berlin GmbH",
  "phone": "030 7 21 50 20",
  "street": "Unter den Linden 42",
  "postalCode": "10117",
  "city": "Berlin",
  "lat": 52.5170365,
  "lng": 13.3888599,
  "website": "https://elektriker-berlin.de",
  "categoryType": "Electrician",
  "detailUrl": "https://www.gelbeseiten.de/gsbiz/abc123def456",
  "parse_confidence": 0.85,
  "warnings": []
}

FAQ

Do I need a proxy or API key? No — Gelbe Seiten serves standard HTML from Apify cloud IPs. No proxy and no API key required. Zero extra cost.

What export formats are available? JSON, CSV, Excel, and XML — downloadable from the dataset page or via the Apify REST API.

Can I schedule regular runs? Yes. Use Apify Scheduler (or n8n/Zapier) to run on a cadence and push new results to your CRM, database, or a webhook automatically.

What if the actor returns no results? Verify your category and city parameters are valid German keywords used on gelbeseiten.de (lowercase, e.g. elektriker not Elektriker). Large cities + broad categories (e.g. arzt/berlin) may have 500+ results — use maxItems to limit.

Use cases

• Lead generation for local businesses (phone + address + website)
• Market research by category/city
• Local SEO competitive analysis
• Building contact databases for German cities
• Real estate — find services by postal code area

Use with AI agents (MCP)

This scraper is callable as a tool by AI agents (Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code, n8n, LangGraph, CrewAI, or any MCP-compatible client) via Apify's hosted Model Context Protocol server. An agent uses it to look up German local businesses with phone numbers, addresses, and GPS coordinates mid-conversation — e.g. "find electricians in Berlin", "list restaurants in Munich for our outreach", or "get GPS coordinates of all plumbers in Hamburg".

Point your MCP client at this tool:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "mcp-remote",
        "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=bovi/gelbeseiten-directory",
        "--header",
        "Authorization: Bearer <YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Integrations

Built for lead-gen and local-sales teams building German business contact lists by category and city — the JSON/dataset output drops into the tools you already run, no glue code:

• n8n / Make / Zapier — trigger a run or pipe every new dataset item into 500+ apps (Google Sheets, Airtable, Slack, HubSpot, your database) with no code: n8n, Make, Zapier.
• Webhooks — fire your own endpoint the moment a run finishes, to push results straight into your pipeline (docs).
• MCP server — expose this actor as a tool to Claude, Cursor, or any MCP client so an AI agent can pull this data mid-conversation (guide).
• API & SDKs — fetch the dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel through the Apify REST API or the Python / JS SDKs.

See all Apify integrations.

Legal note

Gelbe Seiten is a public business directory. All data is publicly listed by businesses themselves. Phone numbers and addresses are published for the explicit purpose of being contacted by potential customers. Scraping for legitimate research and lead generation is consistent with the data's intended purpose.

Limitations

• ~15–20% of listings lack phone numbers (they use Gelbe Seiten's internal contact form)
• ~20% lack GPS coordinates
• Large categories in major cities (e.g. arzt/berlin) may have 500+ results — use maxItems to limit
• Rate: ~1 req/s for detail pages (polite delay built in)

More scrapers from our toolkit

Building a data pipeline? These actors pair well with this one — each runs on your own Apify account with the same pay-per-result pricing, no subscription:

• Google Maps Leads
• Google Maps Scraper
• Hiring Signal Monitor
• Linkedin Profile Scraper
• PagesJaunes Directory Scraper
• Skip Trace People Finder

Chain any of them together from the Integrations tab (the Run succeeded trigger) to build a multi-step workflow — one actor's output feeds the next.

Usage statistics

This Actor creates a small, content-free summary at the end of each run. It is used only to monitor reliability and improve this Actor. A copy is saved as USAGE_STATS in your own Apify key-value store, so you can see the exact record created for your run.

Set disableUsageStats to true in the input to opt out. Nothing is sent then; your USAGE_STATS record only says that statistics were disabled.

Only these fields are recorded:

• schema version, Actor name and build number;
• UTC start and finish hour (not a precise timestamp);
• run duration, number of results and time to the first result, each as a coarse range;
• whether the result was empty, the end status, and an error type from a fixed list;
• memory setting and counts of charged events;
• names of the input fields you set, never their values;
• the selected option for input fields that offer a fixed list of choices (for example a sort order).

We do not collect input text, search terms, URLs, domains, usernames, email addresses, names, proxy credentials, tokens, scraped records, output items, raw error messages, stack traces, or hashes of any of those values. Records are kept for no longer than 13 months, used only as aggregated operational statistics, and never sold or shared.

Additional fields (Phase 2)

This Actor also records your Apify user ID, whether Apify marks the account as paying, the size range of list inputs, the selected country when the input offers a fixed list of countries, and one category from a fixed Actor taxonomy. We use these fields only for aggregate reliability, repeat-use and cross-Actor analysis; reports suppress any cell with fewer than five distinct users.

The same disableUsageStats: true input flag turns these fields off too. The user ID is removed after 13 months; we do not export, sell, share, or attempt to re-identify this data.

Run-outcome signals (v2)

To learn whether a run did what it was asked to do, the record also holds a few more coarse ranges and yes/no flags. None of them contains content:

• the result limit you asked for (a range, when the input has one) and what share of it was delivered;
• results delivered per input item you listed (a range);
• output quality as ranges: how fully the result fields were filled, the share of rows that look like errors, the share of duplicate rows, and how many different fields appeared. These are counted in memory while results are saved; no result content is kept;
• how the run was started (console, API, schedule, webhook, another Actor);
• how it ended: stopped by you, timed out, reached the requested limit, stopped by the charge limit, and how many times the platform moved the run;
• if this Actor reports it: how many items to process worked or failed (ranges) and one failure reason from a fixed list;
• a short code made from the names of the input fields you set, never their values.

Repeat-run fingerprint (v2)

When your Apify user ID is recorded (see above), the record also holds an 8-character one-way code made from your input (proxy settings left out) and this Actor's name. It only lets us see that the same account ran the same input again soon after an unsatisfying run; we never see the input itself. It is stored only in the database, never published, and reports use it in aggregate with the same five-user minimum. It is the one exception to the statement above that no hashes are collected, and disableUsageStats: true turns it off.