OpenStreetMap Place Search — Businesses & POIs Worldwide

Find businesses, amenities and points of interest anywhere on Earth from OpenStreetMap: by place name, by bounding box, or in a radius around a point. Pick from 61 ready-made categories — hotels, restaurants, pharmacies, EV chargers, campsites, museums, coworking spaces — or write raw OSM tags when you need something the list does not cover.

Why OpenStreetMap

Most place-data Actors read a commercial map whose terms forbid storing or redistributing what you extract. OpenStreetMap is different: it is a public database under the Open Database License, built to be reused, downloaded and republished. You can keep it, join it to your own data, ship it inside your product and sell the result, provided you credit OpenStreetMap and keep derived databases under the same licence.

It also carries detail commercial sources flatten away. A restaurant in OSM can tell you its cuisine, whether it has outdoor seating, whether it delivers, whether it is wheelchair accessible, whether it serves vegan food and what hours it keeps. A hotel can tell you its star rating and room count. A charging station can tell you its socket types and capacity. This Actor lifts all of that into named columns.

An honest word on coverage

OpenStreetMap is volunteer-mapped, so completeness varies enormously by place and by category. In a European city centre, expect most restaurants to be present but only a third to carry a phone number. In a rural area or outside Europe, coverage can be thin.

Rather than let you discover that after you have built something on it, every run returns the numbers: how many places were found, and what share of them carry a name, a phone, a website and opening hours. Avignon searched for restaurants, hotels and museums returns 199 places, of which 33% have a phone and 28% have opening hours. Now you know what you are working with.

Three ways to define an area

Place names are resolved to their official boundary. Be specific enough to be unambiguous — Avignon, France rather than Avignon, because there is more than one.

Bounding boxes as south,west,north,east when you already know the exact extent and want no ambiguity at all.

Points with a radius when you care about walking distance rather than administrative lines — a station, a hotel, a site you are evaluating.

What comes back

One summary row per area with the counts and completeness shares, then one row per place:

Field	Example
name, primaryCategory	Hôtel du Palais des Papes, tourism=hotel
address, city, postcode	3 Place du Palais, Avignon
phone, website, email	+33 4 90 86 04 13
openingHours	Su-Th 12:00-13:45, 19:00-21:30
cuisine, stars, rooms, capacity	regional / 3
wheelchair, outdoorSeating, takeaway, delivery	yes
latitude, longitude, osmUrl	43.9503, 4.8079

matchedTags records every filter a place matched, so a venue that is both a bar and a restaurant is visible as both.

Who uses this

Location intelligence and site-selection teams counting competitors and footfall generators. Travel and hospitality products building an inventory they are allowed to keep. Logistics and field-service planners mapping fuel, parking and charging. Retail and franchise expansion comparing catchment areas. Accessibility and mobility projects, for which OSM is often the only source that records step-free access at all. Researchers who need a reproducible, citable extract rather than a screen-scrape.

Fair use

Overpass, the query engine behind this Actor, is donated infrastructure shared by the whole OpenStreetMap community. Requests are therefore sent one at a time, never in parallel, with automatic fallback across three public mirrors and a polite pause between geocoding calls. If a very large area combined with a very high cap times out, narrow the area rather than raising the cap — that is the behaviour that keeps the service available to everyone.

Licence and attribution

Data is © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License. If you publish anything derived from this output you must credit OpenStreetMap, and if you publish a derived database you must license it under ODbL as well. Geocoding of place names uses Nominatim, operated by the OpenStreetMap Foundation.

Frequently asked

Why does a place have no address? Because nobody has mapped one. OSM records what contributors have surveyed; a restaurant can have a name and coordinates but no street number. The completeness shares in the summary row tell you how often this happens in your area.

Can I search a whole country? Technically yes, practically no — a national query on a common tag will exceed what a shared Overpass instance will do for one user. Split it by region or city.

Is this a Google Maps replacement? For legal reuse and for rich attributes, often yes. For sheer completeness of small businesses in some countries, no. The honest answer depends on your area, which is exactly why the coverage figures are returned.

Does the summary count towards my place charges? No. Areas and places are charged separately, and an area that returns nothing is charged only as an area.