AskLaila India Business Directory Scraper

Scrape AskLaila — one of India's longest-running local business directories — to extract structured records for restaurants, doctors, hotels, gyms, schools, plumbers, electricians, salons, supermarkets, and dozens more categories across 45+ Indian cities.

The actor pulls every datum AskLaila publicly exposes via Schema.org microdata when first-party pages are available: business name, multi-line postal address, multiple phone numbers, geo coordinates, ratings, review counts, recommendation percentage, services & amenities, cuisine, payment options, photos, and review snippets. When AskLaila temporarily blocks or times out, it can still emit real Google-indexed AskLaila listing URL/title/location rows instead of returning an empty dataset.

Why this actor

• No login, no API keys, no cookies. AskLaila is a public directory; everything is server-side rendered.
• Cloud-stable fallback. The actor first tries AskLaila directly, retries with standard Apify Proxy AUTO when enabled, and falls back to Google-indexed AskLaila listing URLs when AskLaila temporarily returns 503/timeouts.
• Rich Schema.org microdata. Listings expose LocalBusiness / Restaurant itemtypes with addresses, geo, aggregate ratings, cuisine, payment, and reviews — the actor maps every field.
• 45+ Indian cities, 50+ pre-curated categories. Pick any city + category from a dropdown — no URL crafting required.
• Locality drill-down. Narrow searches to a specific neighborhood (e.g. Koramangala in Bangalore, Andheri in Mumbai).
• Category/service keyword search. Search by a service or business-category term (e.g. pizza restaurants, ac repair) inside a city — see the keywordSearch note below for what does and doesn't work.

Modes

Mode	When to use it	Required inputs
byCategory (default)	Pick a city + category from dropdowns	city, category (locality optional)
searchUrls	Paste AskLaila search/category URLs you already have	searchUrls
listingUrls	Enrich a known list of business detail page URLs	listingUrls
keywordSearch	Search by a category/service term inside a city (see note below)	city, keyword
indexedSearch	Query Google-indexed AskLaila listing pages directly for maximum cloud reliability	city plus category or keyword

Output (per-business record)

Each dataset row represents a single business. Fields are emitted only when AskLaila publishes them — there are no null/empty values in your dataset.

• name — business name (e.g. Hallimane)
• category — primary category (e.g. Restaurant, Dentist, Plumber)
• businessType — Schema.org type (Restaurant, LocalBusiness, Hospital, ...)
• breadcrumbs — site breadcrumb trail from city → category → business
• phoneNumbers — array of digits-only phone numbers (multiple per business is common)
• streetAddress, locality, city, postalCode, fullAddress, landmark
• latitude, longitude — Schema.org GeoCoordinates
• ratingValue, ratingCount, reviewCount, recommendPercent
• cuisine (restaurants), paymentAccepted, attributes (a key/value map of category-specific facts: Catering, Home Delivery, Veg/Non-Veg, AC, Valet Parking, Credit Cards Accepted, Alcohol, Working Hours, ...)
• photos — array of photo URLs
• reviews — array of {authorName, ratingValue, datePublished, reviewBody}
• listingUrl, canonicalUrl, listingId, sourceUrl, dataSource, sourcePageType
• recordType, scrapedAt, siteName

Filters

• minRating — drop businesses below an integer rating threshold (1-5).
• minReviewCount — drop businesses with too few reviews.
• fetchListingDetails — enable to enrich each card from its detail page. It is off by default for the most reliable daily run.
• includeReviews — disable to skip review extraction on detail pages.
• maxItems — hard cap on the total emitted records (1-1000).

Proxy / runtime inputs

• useProxy — route requests through Apify proxy. Off by default; AskLaila is reachable from datacenter IPs.
• autoEscalateOnBlock — if a fetch is empty or blocked, retry once with standard Apify Proxy AUTO.
• proxyConfiguration — advanced Apify proxy configuration object; only used when useProxy=true.

Coverage

The dropdowns expose 45+ major Indian cities and 50+ business categories. Beyond the dropdowns, paste any AskLaila URL into searchUrls or listingUrls and the actor will scrape it — coverage is effectively the entire AskLaila corpus.

Frequently asked questions

Does this need an account, cookies, or login? No. AskLaila is fully public.

Will I get blocked? Some city/category pages can be temporarily unavailable from public exits. The default prefill retries with Apify Proxy AUTO and then uses Google-indexed AskLaila listings if the first-party page is still unavailable.

Can I get phone numbers? Yes. AskLaila publishes multiple phone numbers per business (phoneNumbers array). They are returned as digits-only strings, ready for downstream cleansing.

Can I get business reviews? Yes — set fetchListingDetails=true and includeReviews=true. Reviews include the reviewer name, star rating, date, and review body when visible on the detail page.

Can I get geo coordinates? Yes — when AskLaila has them on the listing detail page (most listings do), latitude and longitude are emitted as floats.

Does it support pagination? Yes — the actor automatically follows AskLaila's 20-per-page pagination until maxItems is reached or the listings are exhausted.

What do dataSource and sourcePageType mean? asklaila rows are parsed from first-party AskLaila search/detail pages and can include the rich fields above. google_index rows are real AskLaila listing URLs discovered from Google's index and reliably include URL, title, city/locality/category, and scrape metadata.

Is locality filtering supported? Yes — the optional locality input restricts a byCategory search to a specific neighborhood inside the chosen city.

Are reviews paginated? Visible reviews on the detail page (typically the last 5-20) are extracted. AskLaila does not expose a paginated review API.

Can I search for a specific business by name (e.g. "Domino's", "Apollo Hospital")? Not via keywordSearch — AskLaila doesn't have a working full-text business-name search endpoint this actor can reach; keyword only works for category/service-style terms (the same mechanism as byCategory). If you already know the business, find its page on asklaila.com directly and pass the URL via listingUrls, or pass its category/search-results URL via searchUrls.

Example: top restaurants in Bangalore (Koramangala)

{
  "mode": "byCategory",
  "city": "Bangalore",
  "category": "restaurants",
  "locality": "Koramangala",
  "fetchListingDetails": true,
  "includeReviews": true,
  "minRating": 4,
  "maxItems": 50
}

Example: keyword search

keywordSearch builds the same kind of URL as byCategory, using your keyword in place of the category dropdown — so it works for category/service-style terms AskLaila actually has a directory page for (e.g. the category dropdown values, or close variants like pizza restaurants, car rentals). It is not a business-name lookup: AskLaila does not expose a working full-text search for individual businesses (e.g. Apollo Hospital, Domino's) via any endpoint this actor can reach, and if keyword doesn't match a real category, AskLaila silently serves an unrelated fallback city's page — the actor detects this and aborts with a clear status message rather than emit mismatched data. To find a specific known business, use searchUrls/listingUrls with a URL copied directly from asklaila.com instead.

{
  "mode": "keywordSearch",
  "city": "Mumbai",
  "keyword": "pizza restaurants",
  "maxItems": 25
}

Example: enrich a list of profiles

{
  "mode": "listingUrls",
  "listingUrls": [
    "https://www.asklaila.com/listing/Bangalore/malleswaram/hallimane/1OjwP4uM/"
  ],
  "includeReviews": true
}

Example: indexed search fallback

{
  "mode": "indexedSearch",
  "city": "Mumbai",
  "category": "dentists",
  "maxItems": 50
}