FreeIndex Scraper - UK Business Directory

Scrape FreeIndex (freeindex.co.uk) — a UK business directory with 450,000+ business reviews. Search any business category in any UK city and get names, addresses, phone numbers, ratings, reviews, opening hours, and websites. Optionally fetch each business's full profile for GPS coordinates, structured opening hours, and social links. No login, no cookies, no API key required.

What this actor does

• Two modes: search (category + city) and byUrl (direct business profile URLs)
• 163 curated categories to pick from, or type any custom category slug
• 90 curated UK cities and towns, or type any custom city slug
• Sort by relevance, rating, review count, or name (A-Z)
• Filter by minimum rating (1-5 stars), minimum review count, or "Premium Member" businesses only
• Rich business profiles — full address, postcode, GPS coordinates, structured opening hours, website, Facebook/Instagram/LinkedIn/Twitter/YouTube/TikTok links
• Empty fields are omitted — you only ever see fields that were actually found for a business

Output per business

• businessName — business name
• description — business-provided description (when profile fetched)
• category, categoryGroup — primary listed category and its parent group (when profile fetched)
• rating — average star rating (1-5), reviewCount — number of reviews
• isPremiumMember — true if flagged as a FreeIndex Premium Member (search-listing field)
• highlights[] — short marketing bullet points shown on the search listing (when present)
• telephone, website
• addressStreet, addressLocality, addressRegion, postalCode, fullAddress (when profile fetched)
• latitude, longitude — GPS coordinates (when profile fetched)
• openingHours[] — structured opening hours ({day, opens, closes} per day; when profile fetched and published)
• priceRange (when profile fetched and published)
• images[] — business photo URLs (when profile fetched)
• recentReviews[] — the business's most recent customer reviews ({author, date, rating, text} per review; when profile fetched and reviews exist)
• facebookUrl, instagramUrl, linkedinUrl, twitterUrl, youtubeUrl, tiktokUrl — social links the business has published (when profile fetched)
• memberSince — ISO date (YYYY-MM-DD) the business joined FreeIndex (when profile fetched)
• lastUpdated — ISO date (YYYY-MM-DD) the business last updated its FreeIndex listing (when profile fetched)
• listingId — FreeIndex's internal numeric listing ID
• searchCategory, searchCity — the search parameters used (mode=search)
• sourceUrl — canonical FreeIndex profile URL for the business
• recordType: "business", scrapedAt

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	string (select)	search	search (category + city) or byUrl (fetch by URL)
category	string (select)	plumbers	Pick one of 163 curated categories, or custom to use customCategory (mode=search)
customCategory	string	–	Any free-text category slug, overrides category (mode=search)
city	string (select)	london	Pick one of 90 curated UK cities, or custom to use customCity (mode=search)
customCity	string	–	Any free-text city slug, overrides city (mode=search)
fetchDetails	boolean	true	Also visit each business's profile page for phone, address, coordinates, opening hours, website, and social links
sortBy	string (select)	relevance	relevance / rating / reviewCount / name — applied client-side across the fetched batch
minRating	integer	0 (no minimum)	Only return businesses rated at least 1-5 stars
minReviews	integer	0 (no minimum)	Only return businesses with at least this many reviews
premiumOnly	boolean	false	Only return FreeIndex Premium Member businesses
profileUrls	array	–	FreeIndex profile URLs to fetch directly (mode=byUrl)
maxItems	int	20	Hard cap on returned records (1-200)

Example: search plumbers in London

{
  "mode": "search",
  "category": "plumbers",
  "city": "london",
  "maxItems": 20
}

Example: highest-rated electricians in Manchester with 10+ reviews

{
  "mode": "search",
  "category": "electricians",
  "city": "manchester",
  "sortBy": "rating",
  "minReviews": 10,
  "maxItems": 20
}

Example: Premium Member accountants in Birmingham, listing-only (faster)

{
  "mode": "search",
  "category": "accountants",
  "city": "birmingham",
  "premiumOnly": true,
  "fetchDetails": false,
  "maxItems": 20
}

Example: fetch specific business profiles

{
  "mode": "byUrl",
  "profileUrls": [
    { "url": "https://www.freeindex.co.uk/profile(taylors-heating-solutions)_85620.htm" }
  ]
}

Use cases

• Local lead generation — build a prospect list of UK businesses by trade and city for B2B outreach
• Market research — measure business density and average ratings for a category across UK cities
• Directory aggregation — feed structured UK business data into your own local-search product
• Competitor mapping — see who else operates in a category and city, with ratings and contact info
• Reputation monitoring — track a business's rating and review count over time via mode=byUrl

Limitations

• One listing page per city+category search, capped at ~20 businesses. FreeIndex's server-rendered <city>-<category>.htm listing pages show up to 20 businesses each (Premium Members first, then organic listings) with no further query-string pagination exposed. This is a genuine upstream page-size cap, not an actor bug — a category with hundreds of London listings (e.g. london-plumbers.htm shows "1,413 Reviews" in its own page title) still only exposes the same top ~20 profile links in the page HTML. To collect more records for one category, run multiple city searches and combine results, or use mode=byUrl with a larger list of profile URLs collected across runs.
• Not every city+category combination has a results page. FreeIndex only pre-generates a <city>-<category>.htm page for combinations that have at least one listed business. A real city and a real category can still 404 in combination (e.g. glasgow-accountants.htm). When this happens, the actor returns 0 records with a clear set_status_message explaining the pair has no results page — try a nearby city or a different category rather than treating it as an error.
• sortBy, minRating, minReviews, and premiumOnly are applied client-side across the batch of records this run actually fetched (up to 20 per search), not the entire category nationwide.
• The website field points to whatever the business published on FreeIndex, without an uptime guarantee. sourceUrl and images[] are always FreeIndex's own URLs and are 100% reliable. website is a third-party business's own domain; occasionally it's expired/unregistered or protected by the business's own bot-blocking WAF (verified via clean-shell curl sampling during QA — most resolve fine, a small fraction don't, entirely outside this actor's control).
• openingHours reflects what the business itself published. Some businesses show a generic "00:00-23:59" every day (effectively "hours not specified" rather than "open 24 hours") — this is upstream data, not an actor artifact.

FAQ

What data source does this actor use? It reads the publicly available search-listing and business-profile pages on freeindex.co.uk. No account or API key is needed.

Is this affiliated with FreeIndex? No. This is an independent, third-party actor that reads publicly accessible pages.

Why do some businesses have no rating, phone, or website? FreeIndex only shows contact/social details a business itself provided, and a rating only once the business has received at least one review. Fields with no data are simply omitted from the record rather than shown as empty or null.

Why is fetchDetails on by default? Business phone number, full address, postcode, coordinates, opening hours, and website are only available on the profile page, not the search-listing card. Turn it off only if you need a faster, listing-only pull (name, locality, rating, review count).

Does this actor need a proxy or login? No — FreeIndex's search and profile pages are served without any anti-bot challenge, so this actor runs entirely on Apify's free plan with no proxy and no credentials. The actor automatically escalates to Apify's free AUTO proxy group only if it ever encounters a rate limit.

What's the difference between category and customCategory (or city and customCity)? category/city are curated dropdowns covering FreeIndex's most common categories and UK cities. customCategory/customCity let you type any FreeIndex category or city slug directly (see the URL of any <city>-<category>.htm page on freeindex.co.uk for the exact slug format) and take priority when set.