Colorado Secretary of State Business Search Scraper

Search Colorado's official business entity registry, published by the Colorado Secretary of State on the state's own open-data portal (data.colorado.gov). Look up a business by entity name, exact entity ID, registered agent name, or principal city, and get entity type, status, formation date, jurisdiction of formation, principal/mailing address, and registered agent details. HTTP-only via Colorado's public open-data API — no login required.

Data Source & Usage Notes

Read this before running a large job.

• No login, no API key, no CAPTCHA. The source is Colorado's public Socrata open-data API (data.colorado.gov/resource/4ykn-tg5h.json), the same underlying Secretary of State record set that powers the interactive search at coloradosos.gov/biz.
• Why the open-data API instead of coloradosos.gov/biz directly? Confirmed live: both www.sos.state.co.us and coloradosos.gov sit behind a Cloudflare managed challenge (a JS-execution bot check) that returns a 403 "Attention Required" page to any non-browser request regardless of User-Agent. Colorado's own Secretary of State publishes the identical business-entity dataset, updated regularly, on the state's official open-data portal with no such challenge — this actor queries that official mirror directly.
• jurisdictionOfFormation is free text, not a normalized code. Filers enter this field themselves on the source's own filings, so values range from CO / Colorado to full state names, countries, county names, and occasional stray addresses or dates. The filter is a case-insensitive substring match, not an enum.
• No individual-officer or filing-number search axis. The open-data extract carries entity-level and registered-agent fields only; it does not include the interactive site's officer/director listing or filing history, so those are not exposed here.
• Conservative by design. The actor only ever uses Apify's free datacenter (AUTO) proxy group — never a paid residential proxy — to get a fresh IP if a request is ever blocked.
• Not affiliated with the State of Colorado. This is an independent third-party tool using the Secretary of State's own public, no-login open-data API.

Why Colorado's open-data API instead of the interactive search site?

This actor was originally scoped to scrape sos.state.co.us directly. Live verification showed that domain (and its coloradosos.gov alias) return a Cloudflare managed-challenge 403 to all non-browser HTTP traffic, including Apify's own datacenter proxy IPs — a genuine block per this project's zero-cost reliability policy. Rather than replace the target state entirely, this actor uses the Colorado Secretary of State's own official open-data republication of the exact same business-entity registry (data.colorado.gov), confirmed live and returning real, current data with no CAPTCHA or challenge of any kind.

What this actor does

• 4 search modes:
  • byEntityName — business entity name (substring match)
  • byEntityId — exact Colorado Secretary of State entity ID
  • byAgentName — registered agent individual or organization name (substring match)
  • byCity — principal-office city (exact match)
• Entity status filter — 15 status values (Good Standing, Delinquent, Administratively Dissolved, etc.)
• Entity type filter — 33 entity type codes (LLC, corporation, nonprofit, partnership, trust, etc.)
• Jurisdiction of formation filter — substring match against the filer-entered jurisdiction text
• Principal address state filter — exact match against the entity's principal-office US state/territory
• Formation date range filter — formationDateFrom / formationDateTo (YYYY-MM-DD)
• Automatic pagination up to maxItems (the open-data API supports offset-based paging past the 1,000-row single-page limit)
• Empty fields are omitted

What's NOT included (and why)

• Individual officer/director names — not present in the open-data extract; the interactive site's officer listing is a separate, non-open-data feature.
• Filing history / document list — not present in the open-data extract.
• NAICS industry code — not present in this dataset (unlike some other states' registries).
• A normalized jurisdiction code — see "Data Source & Usage Notes" above; jurisdictionOfFormation is filer-entered free text.

Output per entity

• entityName
• entityId — Colorado Secretary of State entity ID number
• entityType — human-readable, e.g. Domestic Limited Liability Company
• entityTypeCode — raw source code, e.g. DLLC
• status — e.g. Good Standing, Delinquent
• jurisdictionOfFormation — filer-entered text, e.g. DE, Colorado
• formationDate — YYYY-MM-DD
• principalAddress, principalCity, principalState, principalZip
• mailingAddress — when on file
• registeredAgentName (includes filer-entered suffix, e.g. John Smith, Jr.), registeredAgentAddress (agent's principal/street address), registeredAgentMailingAddress (agent's mailing address, when on file and different from the principal address)
• sourceUrl — link to this entity's record on Colorado's open-data API
• recordType: "entity", scrapedAt

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	string	byEntityName	One of the 4 search modes
entityName	string	WALMART	mode=byEntityName
entityId	string	–	mode=byEntityId
agentName	string	–	mode=byAgentName
principalCity	string	–	mode=byCity
entityStatus	string	any	Optional status filter
entityType	string	any	Optional entity type filter
jurisdictionOfFormation	string	–	Optional substring filter
principalState	string	any	Optional exact-match principal-office state/territory filter
formationDateFrom	string	–	Optional YYYY-MM-DD lower bound on formation date
formationDateTo	string	–	Optional YYYY-MM-DD upper bound on formation date
proxyConfiguration	object	AUTO proxy	Apify proxy config; always datacenter (AUTO), never residential
maxItems	int	25	Hard cap (1–1000)

Example: search by entity name

{
  "mode": "byEntityName",
  "entityName": "TESLA",
  "maxItems": 10
}

Example: lookup by exact entity ID

{
  "mode": "byEntityId",
  "entityId": "19871633113"
}

Example: search by registered agent

{
  "mode": "byAgentName",
  "agentName": "CT CORPORATION SYSTEM",
  "maxItems": 25
}

Example: browse by principal city and status

{
  "mode": "byCity",
  "principalCity": "Denver",
  "entityStatus": "Good Standing",
  "entityType": "DLLC",
  "maxItems": 50
}

Use cases

• Due diligence — confirm a counterparty's Colorado formation date, entity type, and registered agent before contracting
• Compliance & KYC — cross-check a business's legal entity name and entity ID
• Registered agent research — find every entity a specific agent represents
• Local market research — pull every active entity in a given city
• Company name availability checks — see what similarly-named entities already exist before choosing a new name

FAQ

What's the data source? The Colorado Secretary of State's own business-entity registry, published on the state's official open-data portal at data.colorado.gov. This actor is an independent third-party tool and is not affiliated with the State of Colorado.

Is this data official / legally binding? No. For an official Certificate of Good Standing or certified copies, use the state's paid ordering channels via coloradosos.gov. This actor returns the same free, public informational data the state republishes as open data.

Why did my run return 0 results? Either the query genuinely has no match, or a status/type/jurisdiction filter is narrower than expected. Try a broader query or remove a filter.

How fresh is the data? The open-data extract is refreshed regularly by the Colorado Secretary of State (typically daily); it may lag the live interactive site by up to a day.

Can I search inactive/dissolved businesses? Yes — set entityStatus to any of the 15 available values, including Administratively Dissolved, Voluntarily Dissolved, Revoked, and Withdrawn.

Can I filter by principal-office state or formation date? Yes — principalState narrows results to a single US state/territory, and formationDateFrom / formationDateTo narrow results to a formation-date range. Both combine with any search mode and any other filter.