Iowa Business Entity Search Scraper

Search the Iowa Secretary of State business register by company name and get back the business number, the matched name, the entity's status, the name type and the registered legal name as structured records. You give it a name, not a URL: Iowa's registry has no shareable results link, so this Actor fills in and submits the public search form for you. No API key, no login, no captcha. Set max_items before each run and the cost of the run is decided before it starts.

What data can I extract?

• The Iowa business number, which is the key for looking an entity up on the state site
• Every name the register holds against that entity: legal names, fictitious (trade) names and former names
• The entity's registry status, so you can drop dead companies before they reach a call list
• The registered legal name behind a trade name, which is what turns "a-1 locksmith" into "a1 all american locksmith llc"

Five fields per row, one row per matching name. Values are Unicode-normalised, whitespace-collapsed and lowercased, so they are safe to dedupe and join against other datasets without a cleaning pass. Everything lands in the default dataset and downloads as JSON, CSV, Excel or XML.

One thing to know before your first run: Iowa matches anywhere in the name, not just at the start. Searching SMITH also returns 10 minute locksmith llc and 4r gunsmithing, l.lc.. That is the state's own search behaviour, not a defect here. It is useful for broad sweeps and misleading if you assume a prefix match.

All 17 columns

Identity — business_number, legal_name, name

Status — state_of_inc, status, type

Dates — effective_date, expiration_date, filing_date

Location — principal_address, principal_address_2, principal_city_state_zip, registered_agent_address, registered_agent_address_2, registered_agent_city_state_zip

People — registered_agent

Other detail — chapter

Input example

{
  "search_terms": ["SMITH"],
  "max_items": 25
}

search_terms takes a list, so one run can cover several names. max_items is a hard ceiling on records emitted and therefore on what the run can cost; it defaults to 100. start_urls exists in the shared input schema for registries that have GET-able result pages — Iowa does not, so leave it empty and use search_terms.

Output example

Real records from a run of the input above:

[
  {
    "business_number": "853463",
    "name": "10 minute locksmith llc",
    "status": "active",
    "type": "legal",
    "legal_name": "10 minute locksmith llc"
  },
  {
    "business_number": "748031",
    "name": "a-1 locksmith",
    "status": "active",
    "type": "fictitious name",
    "legal_name": "a1 all american locksmith llc"
  },
  {
    "business_number": "2488",
    "name": "a-1 locksmith services, inc.",
    "status": "active",
    "type": "former",
    "legal_name": "flatlander forge, inc."
  },
  {
    "business_number": "37810",
    "name": "a. & c. smith farm, ltd.",
    "status": "inactive",
    "type": "legal",
    "legal_name": "a. & c. smith farm, ltd."
  }
]

Read type as "what kind of name is in the name column", not "what kind of company this is". On legal rows name and legal_name are the same string. On fictitious name and former rows they differ, and the pair is the useful part: a trade name on the left, the company that actually owns it on the right. business_number repeats across rows when one entity holds several names — 748031 above appears three times in the same run: once as its legal name and once for each of the two trade names registered against it.

Common use cases

• Lead lists for local services. Sweep a trade word ("locksmith", "plumbing", "roofing") and keep the active rows. The contains-match that surprises people on a name search is exactly what you want here.
• Trade name resolution. You have a name from an invoice, a sign or an ad and need the registered company behind it. Search the trade name, read legal_name.
• Vendor and counterparty checks. Confirm an Iowa counterparty exists in the register and is not inactive before onboarding them.
• Deduplicating a CRM. The normalised output joins cleanly against existing records, and business_number gives you a stable key that survives rebrands.
• Chasing a rename. A former row points from an old name to the current legal name, which is how you find a company that has moved on since your data was collected.

Use with AI agents and MCP

Apify's MCP server can discover and call this Actor from an agent workflow. A workable intent:

Search the Iowa business register for "locksmith", return at most 25 records, and give me the active ones with their legal names.

Pass the JSON from Input example as the tool arguments. The input schema is strict and rejects unsupported parameters rather than silently ignoring them, and each dataset field carries a title, a description and a real example, so an agent can interpret type and legal_name without guessing. Point the agent at max_items as its spend control: it is the only lever that bounds the record count, and the agent should set it explicitly rather than inherit the default.

Pricing and cost control

Output is billed per result at $0.004 per result (about $4.00 per 1,000 results), plus a $0.0005 Actor-start charge billed once per gigabyte of memory at run start. Use max_items to cap both output volume and charges. The price shown on the Apify Store listing is authoritative.

There is no subscription and no minimum. You are not billed for the platform compute time the run consumes — this Actor makes no browser request, only plain HTTP, so a run is cheap to execute and that cost sits with the developer, not you.

max_items is the ceiling. Set it to 10 for a first look, read what comes back, then scale once you know the search term behaves as you expect. A vague term on a contains-match registry is the one way to spend more than you meant to.

Reliability

The extraction selectors are not hard-coded into a build. They live in an environment variable that an automated monitor re-derives from the live site every night, validating each candidate against two independent searches and a schema contract before it ships, so ordinary layout drift is usually repaired before a buyer sees it. A run against the bounded default input is kept as a canary.

The Iowa site is ASP.NET, which means the search form only accepts a POST carrying a matching hidden-field pair from a freshly fetched page. This Actor fetches the form first and echoes those fields back on every term, which is what makes the registry reachable over plain HTTP at all. If the state site is down or rate-limiting, the run fails loudly with the HTTP status rather than writing an empty dataset and reporting success.

Limitations and responsible use

• Five fields only. Registered agents, officers, addresses and filing dates live on each entity's detail page and would need a further request per record. This Actor does not open detail pages.
• First results page per term. There is no pagination. A very common term returns the first page the state serves and stops; narrow the term rather than raising max_items.
• Name search only. You cannot search by business number, agent or address.
• Iowa only. Other states run different systems and are covered by separate Actors.
• Status vocabulary is thin. Live output shows active and inactive. There is no dissolution date, no good-standing flag and no filing history in this table.
• Case is lost. Output is lowercased by design for matching. If you need display-cased names, title-case them downstream or fetch the detail page.

Iowa corporate registrations are public records published by the Iowa Secretary of State, and this Actor submits the same public form a visitor would. It collects nothing behind a login. How you use the results is on you, including any marketing, screening and data-protection rules that apply to your use.

FAQ

Why does searching SMITH return locksmiths?

Because Iowa's own search matches the term anywhere in the name. It is the source's behaviour, faithfully passed through. Use a longer or more distinctive term if you want fewer incidental hits.

Do I need an API key or an Iowa account?

No. The register is public and this Actor needs no credentials of any kind.

Why do two rows share a business number?

One entity can hold several names — its legal name plus any fictitious names it has registered. Each name is a row; the business number identifies the entity they all belong to. Deduplicate on business_number if you want one row per company.

What does type: former mean?

The name matched is one the entity used previously. legal_name on that row is the name it goes by now.

Can I get addresses, officers or filing dates?

Not from this Actor. Those fields are on the per-entity detail page, which this Actor does not open.

How do I control what a run costs?

Set max_items. It caps the number of records emitted, and records are what you are charged for. Start at 10.

Can I export the results?

Yes. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV, Excel or XML from the run's Dataset tab, or pull it from the Apify API.

What happens if a field is missing on the source page?

That field comes back as null for that record only. A missing value never shifts the other fields or the rows that follow it.