Kiwi Directory Scraper - New Zealand Business Directory

Scrape kiwidirectory.co.nz — a New Zealand business directory. Search any business category or region, or run a free-text keyword search, and get names, addresses, phone numbers, categories, regions, opening hours, websites, social links, GPS coordinates, and photos. No login, no cookies, no API key required.

What this actor does

• Four modes: search (category and/or region and/or keyword), byCategory (browse one category), byRegion (browse one region), byUrl (fetch specific listing URLs)
• 9 curated categories — Automotive, Entertainment, Health, Home & Garden, Marine, Miscellaneous, Professional, Real Estate, Travel & Tourism
• 7 New Zealand regions — Auckland, Canterbury, Northland, Wellington, Waikato, Marlborough, Manawatu-Whanganui
• Free-text keyword search across business names and descriptions
• Sort by relevance, name (A-Z), or region (A-Z)
• Filter by "has a website", "has a phone number", and/or "featured listing only"
• Rich business profiles — GPS coordinates, structured opening hours, website, Facebook/Instagram/LinkedIn/Twitter/YouTube links, photos
• Full Māori macron support — names like Whāngārei are handled correctly in both input and output
• Empty fields are omitted — you only ever see fields that were actually found for a business

Output per business

• name — business name
• description — business description
• searchCategory — the category this business was found under (mode=search / byCategory)
• region, subRegion — New Zealand region and sub-region/city, from the business's own address
• searchRegion — the region this business was found under (mode=search / byRegion)
• street, city, postalCode, country
• latitude, longitude — GPS coordinates
• phone, email, website
• facebookUrl, instagramUrl, linkedinUrl, twitterUrl, youtubeUrl — social links the business has published
• rating, reviewCount — when the business has received at least one review
• featured — true when kiwidirectory.co.nz marks the listing with its own "Featured" badge on browse pages (omitted, not false, otherwise)
• openingHours[] — structured opening hours ({day, opens, closes} per slot), when published
• images[] — business photos
• sourceUrl — canonical kiwidirectory.co.nz listing URL for the business
• recordType: "business", scrapedAt

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	string (select)	search	search, byCategory, byRegion, or byUrl
category	string (select)	automotive	One of 9 categories, or "All categories" (mode=search, byCategory)
region	string (select)	– (all)	One of 7 NZ regions, or "All regions" (mode=search, byRegion)
keyword	string	–	Free-text keyword search (mode=search, used when category is "All categories")
businessUrls	array	–	kiwidirectory.co.nz listing URLs to fetch directly (mode=byUrl)
sortBy	string (select)	relevance	relevance / name (A-Z) / region (A-Z) — applied client-side across the fetched batch
hasWebsiteOnly	boolean	false	Only return businesses with a website link
hasPhoneOnly	boolean	false	Only return businesses with a phone number
featuredOnly	boolean	false	Only return businesses marked "Featured" by the site itself
maxItems	int	20	Hard cap on returned records (1-500)

Example: browse all automotive businesses

{
  "mode": "byCategory",
  "category": "automotive",
  "maxItems": 20
}

Example: browse businesses in the Auckland region

{
  "mode": "byRegion",
  "region": "auckland",
  "maxItems": 20
}

Example: keyword search with filters

{
  "mode": "search",
  "category": "",
  "keyword": "dent removal",
  "hasWebsiteOnly": true,
  "maxItems": 20
}

Example: fetch specific business profiles

{
  "mode": "byUrl",
  "businessUrls": [
    { "url": "https://kiwidirectory.co.nz/listings/dent-devils-paintless-dent-removal/" }
  ]
}

Use cases

• Local lead generation — build a prospect list of New Zealand businesses by trade and region for B2B outreach
• Market research — see business density and coverage for a category across NZ regions
• Directory aggregation — feed structured New Zealand business data into your own local-search product
• Competitor mapping — see who else operates in a category and region, with contact info
• Data enrichment — resolve businessUrls you already have (e.g. from a sitemap or another source) into full structured profiles

Data source and a note on Yellow.co.nz

This actor's original target was yellow.co.nz, New Zealand's best-known business directory. During development we found that yellow.co.nz's edge network (CloudFront) returns a hard 403 Request blocked response to every request from outside New Zealand — confirmed identical across a direct HTTP request, a full headless-Chromium browser session, and an actual Apify cloud run through both no-proxy and Apify's free AUTO datacenter-proxy group. The block is a static, pre-rendered error page (not a bot/JS challenge), which means it is enforced at the network edge rather than by inspecting the request — no proxy tier available on Apify's free plan can pass it, and using a paid residential/geo-targeted proxy is outside this actor's zero-cost design.

kiwidirectory.co.nz was selected as a same-category, unblocked replacement: a real, live New Zealand business directory (WordPress + GeoDirectory) that publishes clean, structured schema.org LocalBusiness data for every listing. It is smaller in scale than yellow.co.nz (roughly 100+ listings across 9 categories and 7 regions at the time of writing, and growing), which is reflected honestly below rather than padded with placeholder data.

Limitations

• Directory size. kiwidirectory.co.nz is a boutique NZ directory, not a nationwide index — expect roughly 5-25 listings per category and a total in the low hundreds. Every returned record is real, verified data; this actor never fabricates or pads results to reach maxItems.
• No combined category + region URL. The site itself doesn't expose a single URL that filters by both category and region at once. When both are set in search mode, the actor crawls the category's listing pages and applies the region as a client-side filter, so total matches can be smaller than either dimension alone.
• sortBy, hasWebsiteOnly, hasPhoneOnly, featuredOnly are applied client-side. The site's own listing pages don't support a sort or has-website/has-phone/featured query parameter, so these are applied across the batch of records this run actually fetched.
• Ratings. Most listings currently have zero reviews, so rating/reviewCount are present only on the (currently few) businesses that have received at least one review — this is expected and not a bug.

FAQ

What data source does this actor use? It reads the publicly available category, region, search, and listing pages on kiwidirectory.co.nz, a New Zealand business directory. No account or API key is needed.

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

Why do some businesses have no website, phone, or rating? kiwidirectory.co.nz only shows the contact details and ratings a business itself provided or has received. Fields with no data are simply omitted from the record rather than shown as empty or null.

Can I search by both category and region at once? Yes, in search mode — set both category and region. The actor crawls the category's pages and filters to the chosen region client-side (see Limitations).

Can I search all businesses without any category filter? Yes — in search mode, set category to "All categories" and either provide a keyword, set a region, or leave both empty to page through every listing.

How accurate are the GPS coordinates? latitude/longitude come directly from the business's own kiwidirectory.co.nz listing page.

Does this actor need a proxy or login? No — kiwidirectory.co.nz's pages are served without any anti-bot challenge, so this actor runs entirely on Apify's free plan with no proxy and no credentials. A free Apify AUTO proxy fallback is wired in for resilience but is not required for normal operation.

Does this actor cover yellow.co.nz? No — see "Data source and a note on Yellow.co.nz" above for why yellow.co.nz could not be scraped within this actor's zero-cost, no-login design, and why kiwidirectory.co.nz was used instead.