## Manta Business Directory Scraper
**💰 $1.25 / 1 000 results** · pay only for results · no credit card to try
*We do the dirty work so your dataset stays clean.* 😈
Search manta.com's US business directory by category/keyword and city or state — one row per business with name, phone, address, category, SIC code, employee-count and revenue estimates, website, and founding year.
***
### 🎯 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
```json
{
"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
```json
{
"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.
***
Built by **[Devil Scrapes](https://apify.com/DevilScrapes)** 😈 — a small fleet of
opinionated public-data Actors. Honest pricing, real engineering, zero fine print.
# Actor input Schema
## `searchTerm` (type: `string`):
Category or free-text keyword, e.g. "plumbers" or "marketing agencies".
## `location` (type: `string`):
US city+state ("City, ST") or a bare 2-letter state code (state-only broadens the search to the whole state). Not geocoded — format-shape validation only.
## `maxResults` (type: `integer`):
Cap on total rows emitted for the run.
## `proxyConfiguration` (type: `object`):
Mandatory-by-default RESIDENTIAL proxy — manta.com is a confirmed Cloudflare Managed Challenge target (live-verified 403 + Cf-Mitigated: challenge on 2026-08-01) on every probed path.
## Actor input object example
```json
{
"searchTerm": "plumbers",
"location": "Austin, TX",
"maxResults": 300,
"proxyConfiguration": {
"useApifyProxy": true,
"apifyProxyGroups": [
"RESIDENTIAL"
]
}
}
```
# Actor output Schema
## `datasetItems` (type: `string`):
All dataset items as JSON.
## `datasetItemsCsv` (type: `string`):
Same data exported to CSV.
## `datasetView` (type: `string`):
Open the run dataset in the Console.
# API
You can run this Actor programmatically using our API. Below are code examples in JavaScript, Python, and CLI, as well as the OpenAPI specification and MCP server setup.
## JavaScript example
```javascript
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';
// Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
// Replace the '