Manta Business Directory Scraper

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🎯 What this scrapes

manta.com aggregates US small/mid-size business listings into a free public directory searchable by category and location. This Actor wraps its search-results pages directly, writing one structured row per listing: name, phone, full address, category, SIC code, employee-count and revenue estimates, website, and founding year — firmographic signal most directory scrapers don't carry alongside contact data.

🔥 What we handle for you

• 🛡️ A real browser, not a script — Manta fronts its directory with a bot wall, so we drive a hardened Firefox (Camoufox) with a genuine fingerprint rather than an HTTP client pretending to be one.
• 🌐 Residential proxy rotation via Apify Proxy — fresh session and exit IP on every block.
• 🔁 Two separate retry budgets — a bot wall (429 / 403) and a dead proxy tunnel are different problems, so we retry them independently on fresh exits. A flaky proxy can no longer burn the budget reserved for real blocks, and the failure message names whichever actually gave out.
• 🧱 Rate-limit-aware pacing — when the target pushes back, we slow down instead of getting banned.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated, ISO-8601 timestamps, stable IDs, JSON / CSV / Excel export straight from the Apify Console.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for results that hit your dataset. No data, no charge.

💡 Use cases

• Sales/SDR prospecting — build a call or email list of SMBs in a category and city or state, with phone and address ready to dial.
• Local-market research — gauge how many businesses of a category operate in a metro, with firmographic (size/revenue/founding-year) signal alongside contact data.
• Agency lead lists — marketing agencies pulling fresh local-business leads by vertical without paying for a directory subscription.
• Competitive landscape mapping — see who else serves a category+location before entering a market.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free at the top of the page.
2. Fill in the input form — most fields have sensible defaults.
3. Click Start. Output streams into the run's dataset.
4. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or fetch via the API.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
searchTerm	string	yes	'plumbers'	Category or free-text keyword, e.g. "plumbers" or "marketing agencies".
location	string	yes	'Austin, TX'	US city+state ("City, ST") or a bare 2-letter state code.
maxResults	integer	no	300	Cap on total rows emitted for the run.
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{'useApifyProxy': True, 'apifyProxyGroups': ['RESIDENTIAL']}	Mandatory-by-default RESIDENTIAL proxy — manta.com is a confirmed Cloudflare Managed Challenge target (live-verified 202

Example input

{
  "searchTerm": "plumbers",
  "location": "Austin, TX",
  "maxResults": 10,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": [
      "RESIDENTIAL"
    ]
  }
}

📤 Output

Every row is one dataset item.

Field	Type	Notes
business_name	string	Business name from the result card.
phone	['string', 'null']	Phone number, verbatim.
street_address	['string', 'null']	Street address, best-effort parsed.
city	['string', 'null']	City, best-effort parsed.
state	['string', 'null']	State, best-effort parsed.
zip_code	['string', 'null']	ZIP code, best-effort parsed.
category	['string', 'null']	Primary category/industry label.
sic_code	['string', 'null']	SIC code, when exposed on the listing.
employee_count_estimate	['string', 'null']	Employee-count bucket as displayed, e.g. '1-4'.
revenue_estimate	['string', 'null']	Revenue bucket as displayed, e.g. 'Less than $500,000'.
website	['string', 'null']	Outbound website link, verbatim.
year_established	['integer', 'null']	4-digit founding year, when shown.
listing_url	string	Absolute URL to the business's Manta profile page.
search_term	string	Echo of the run's searchTerm input.
location_query	string	Echo of the run's location input.
scraped_at	string	ISO-8601 UTC timestamp when this row was recorded.

Example output

{
  "business_name": "Austin Plumbing Pros LLC",
  "phone": "(512) 555-0134",
  "street_address": "4210 S Lamar Blvd",
  "city": "Austin",
  "state": "TX",
  "zip_code": "78704",
  "category": "Plumbing Contractors",
  "sic_code": "1731",
  "employee_count_estimate": "1-4",
  "revenue_estimate": "Less than $500,000",
  "website": "https://austinplumbingpros.example.com",
  "year_established": 2011,
  "listing_url": "https://www.manta.com/c/mabc1234/austin-plumbing-pros-llc",
  "search_term": "plumbers",
  "location_query": "Austin, TX",
  "scraped_at": "2026-08-01T12:00:00Z"
}

💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event — you pay only when these events fire:

Event	USD	What it is
actor-start	$0.05	One-off warm-up charge per run
result	$0.0012	Per dataset item

Example: 1 000 results at the rates above ≈ $1.25. No subscription, no minimum, no card to start — Apify gives every new account $5 of free credit.

🚧 Limitations

v1 scrapes search-results (list) pages only — individual company profile pages (full description, additional contacts, social links) are out of scope for this build. Employee-count and revenue fields ship as displayed bucket text, never coerced to numeric ranges. website may be Manta's own tracked redirect rather than the business's final domain. Each run is a full fresh scrape — no cross-run deduplication or incremental crawling.

❓ FAQ

Are employee count and revenue exact figures?

No — Manta displays these as ranges (e.g. "1-4 employees", "Less than $500,000"). We capture the bucket text verbatim rather than fabricating a precise number.

Does website always point to the business's own domain?

Not always — it may be Manta's own tracked redirect rather than the business's final domain. We capture the link verbatim; resolving redirects is a documented v2 candidate.

Why does this default to a residential proxy?

manta.com is a confirmed site-wide Cloudflare Managed Challenge (live-verified 403 + Cf-Mitigated: challenge across homepage, search-results, and profile pages). We default proxyConfiguration to Apify's RESIDENTIAL group so runs clear the challenge without you tuning anything.

What happens if a search hits a bot wall?

We relaunch the browser on a fresh residential exit and try again. If Manta is still walling us after the retry budget is spent, we fail the run loud with a message naming the actual cause — never a silent empty dataset wearing a green status.

💬 Your feedback

Spotted a bug, hit a weird edge case, or need a new field? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Console — we ship fixes weekly and we read every report.

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