BBB Scraper — Better Business Bureau Business Profiles, Ratings, Complaints & Accreditation Data Extractor (US + Canada)

The most complete Better Business Bureau (BBB.org) data extraction tool on Apify. Pull full business profiles from BBB — letter grade ratings, accreditation status, complaint counts, customer review scores, owner details, license numbers and contact info — across the entire United States and Canada. Search by keyword, city, state, ZIP, or pre-built BBB search URL, and ship structured JSON ready for B2B lead generation, business-credit risk analysis, reputation monitoring, M&A due diligence, contractor vetting, and journalism workflows.

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What This Actor Does

The BBB Scraper is a production-grade Apify Actor that extracts complete business profiles from the Better Business Bureau (BBB.org) — the largest non-profit business directory in North America, covering more than 5 million companies across the United States and Canada. BBB profiles are widely treated as a de-facto trust signal for local services: roofing contractors, plumbers, HVAC companies, home builders, auto dealers, movers, financial advisors, debt collectors, e-commerce brands, and thousands of other categories all maintain public BBB pages.

This actor opens a real Chromium browser via Playwright (in headed mode under Apify's virtual display), navigates BBB search results and business profile pages, transparently solves Cloudflare's JavaScript challenge, and parses each profile into a normalized JSON record. You drive it with a keyword + location (e.g. "roofing contractor" in "Dallas, TX") or by pasting direct BBB search URLs, and you get back a structured dataset of every business that BBB shows for that query.

Each record can include:

• Identity — business name, BBB business ID, full BBB profile URL
• Trust signals — BBB letter-grade rating (A+ through F), accreditation status, accreditation start date
• Contact — street address, city, state/province, ZIP/postal code, phone, email, website
• Categorization — business categories, service areas, line of business
• Firmographics — years in business, business start date, business type (LLC / Corporation / Sole Proprietorship), employee count band, owner / principal name
• Compliance — license numbers reported to BBB, government action narratives
• Reputation — total complaints closed, complaints in the last 3 years, complaints in the last 12 months, complaints resolved, customer review count, average customer review rating
• Channels — social media URLs (Facebook, LinkedIn, X/Twitter, Instagram) belonging to the business itself, not BBB's own accounts
• Provenance — source search keyword, source search location, ISO-8601 scrapedAt timestamp

The result is the fastest way to populate or refresh a BBB-anchored business dataset for B2B lead generation, reputation monitoring, vendor onboarding, contractor vetting, and investigative reporting.

Why scrape BBB yourself when this exists?

BBB looks like a simple directory until you try to scrape it at scale. Almost every team that tries to roll their own pipeline hits the same wall:

• BBB.org sits behind Cloudflare's JS challenge — naive HTTP clients (requests, axios, got, even got-scraping) get a 403 and an HTML "Just a moment…" page instead of data
• Cloudflare also fingerprints headless Chromium — running Playwright in plain headless: true mode is detected within seconds and challenged on every request
• The search page is React-rendered, so the business cards do not exist in the initial HTML and require a real DOM to materialize
• Pagination is URL-driven (?page=2, ?page=3…) but BBB silently caps deep pagination and serves partial pages near the end of a result set
• Result cards mix organic businesses with paid ads that link out through DoubleClick / Google Ads — those entries have to be filtered out or they pollute your dataset
• Profile URLs include duplicate sub-pages (/details, /accreditation, /customer-reviews, /complaints, /addressId) that all need to be deduplicated to one canonical profile per business
• Profile pages mix JSON-LD structured data, free-text "About this business" prose, and CSS-class-driven panels — extracting accreditation, complaints, owner, and business start date reliably requires four different parsing strategies
• Email addresses on profiles are protected by Cloudflare's email obfuscation (data-cfemail="...") — they have to be decoded with the XOR-key trick before they are readable
• BBB rate-limits aggressively; running anything beyond single-digit concurrency triggers temporary IP blocks
• Categories, service areas, and license numbers live in CSS class names that drift every few months — the parser needs fuzzy class matching that survives BBB's redesigns

This actor solves every one of those problems out of the box. You provide a keyword and location; it returns clean, deduplicated, normalized JSON with all of the BBB trust signals you actually need.

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Quick Start

One-Click Run

1. Open the actor on the Apify Store: apify.com/haketa/bbb-scraper
2. Click "Try for free" and accept the defaults (roofing contractor in Dallas, TX, 5 results, no detail pages)
3. Hit Start — within a minute or two you will have your first dataset of business cards
4. Toggle Scrape Detail Pages to true and bump Max Results to 100 for a full enrichment run

API Run (Python)

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")

run = client.actor("haketa/bbb-scraper").call(run_input={
    "keyword": "roofing contractor",
    "location": "Dallas, TX",
    "country": "USA",
    "accreditedOnly": True,
    "sort": "Rating",
    "scrapeDetails": True,
    "maxResults": 200,
    "maxPages": 10,
    "requestDelay": 2500,
    "proxyConfiguration": {
        "useApifyProxy": True,
        "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"]
    }
})

for record in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(
        record["bbbRating"],
        record["businessName"],
        record["city"],
        record["complaintsLast3Yrs"],
        record["profileUrl"],
    )

API Run (Node.js / TypeScript)

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN' });

const run = await client.actor('haketa/bbb-scraper').call({
    keyword: 'HVAC',
    location: 'Phoenix, AZ',
    country: 'USA',
    accreditedOnly: false,
    sort: 'Relevance',
    scrapeDetails: true,
    maxResults: 100,
    maxPages: 5,
    proxyConfiguration: {
        useApifyProxy: true,
        apifyProxyGroups: ['RESIDENTIAL'],
    },
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(`Pulled ${items.length} Phoenix HVAC companies from BBB`);

const aPlusAccredited = items.filter(
    (b) => b.bbbRating === 'A+' && b.isAccredited === true,
);
console.log(`${aPlusAccredited.length} are A+ rated AND BBB Accredited`);

API Run (cURL)

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/haketa~bbb-scraper/runs?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "keyword": "plumber",
    "location": "Toronto, ON",
    "country": "CAN",
    "scrapeDetails": false,
    "maxResults": 50
  }'

Direct-URL mode (skip keyword/location, use BBB URLs you already have)

run = client.actor("haketa/bbb-scraper").call(run_input={
    "searchUrls": [
        "https://www.bbb.org/search?find_text=electrician&find_loc=Brooklyn%2C+NY&find_country=USA",
        "https://www.bbb.org/search?find_text=auto+repair&find_loc=Los+Angeles%2C+CA&find_country=USA"
    ],
    "scrapeDetails": True,
    "maxResults": 0,   # unlimited
    "maxPages": 15
})

---

How It Works

The actor talks to a single host — www.bbb.org — and walks two layers of pages:

1. Search results pages at https://www.bbb.org/search?find_text={keyword}&find_loc={location}&find_country={USA|CAN}&page={N}&sort={Relevance|Rating|Distance|Name}
2. Business profile pages at https://www.bbb.org/{us|ca}/{state}/{city}/profile/{category-slug}/{business-slug}-{bbbId}

Source endpoints

Layer	URL pattern	Purpose	Engine
Search	bbb.org/search?find_text=...&find_loc=...&find_country=...&page=N	List business cards 20 per page	Playwright + Cheerio
Profile	bbb.org/{country}/{state}/{city}/profile/{category}/{slug}-{bbbId}	Full firmographics, complaints, reviews	Playwright + Cheerio
JSON-LD	Embedded <script type="application/ld+json"> on profile pages	Structured business name, address, phone, ratings	Cheerio JSON parse

Engineering details

• Headed Playwright Chromium — runs with headless: false under Apify's xvfb virtual display. Headless Chromium is detected and challenged by Cloudflare almost immediately; headed mode under xvfb passes the same fingerprint checks a real browser passes.
• Stealth init script — navigator.webdriver is set to undefined and window.chrome.runtime is stubbed before any page navigates, killing the two most common bot-detection flags.
• Cloudflare challenge loop — every navigation enters a 15-step wait loop that watches document.title and the first 200 chars of body.innerText for the strings Just a moment, Checking your browser, and Verify you are human. The loop exits as soon as real <a href*="/profile/"> links appear or the body length crosses 500 characters.
• Custom UA + viewport — Chrome 124 on Windows 10 at 1920x1080, en-US locale, JavaScript enabled.
• Cheerio parsing — once the HTML is in hand, parsing is done with Cheerio in-process (zero browser overhead per field extraction).
• Ad filtering — search-card links that go through doubleclick.net, adclick, or googleads are dropped before they reach the dataset.
• Sub-page deduplication — links ending in /details, /accreditation, /customer-reviews, /complaints, or /addressId are stripped down to the canonical profile URL and deduplicated via a Set.
• BBB ID extraction — the trailing -XXXXXXXX numeric segment of the profile slug becomes the stable bbbId.
• Multi-strategy field extraction — accreditation, complaints, owner name, business type, and employee count are extracted from (a) JSON-LD Organization / LocalBusiness blocks, (b) CSS-class-keyed panels, and (c) free-text regex over the full page body. First non-null wins.
• Cloudflare email decoder — data-cfemail attributes are decoded with the XOR-key trick (first byte = key, remaining bytes XORed) so obfuscated emails become readable.
• Social media hygiene — Facebook / LinkedIn / X / Instagram URLs are filtered against a blocklist of BBB's own accounts (betterbusinessbureau, bbb_us, share-intent URLs) so you only get the business's socials.
• Random-jitter delay — each subsequent request waits requestDelay + random(0–1000ms) to avoid forming a detectable cadence.
• Single-concurrency default — maxConcurrency = 1 and capped at 3. BBB rate-limits aggressively; speed comes from requestDelay tuning, not parallelism.
• Graceful partial output — fatal errors flush whatever was already collected and call Actor.exit with a non-zero exit code so the run is visibly failed without losing progress.

---

Input Parameters

{
  "searchUrls": [],
  "keyword": "roofing contractor",
  "location": "Dallas, TX",
  "country": "USA",
  "accreditedOnly": false,
  "sort": "Relevance",
  "scrapeDetails": false,
  "maxResults": 100,
  "maxPages": 10,
  "requestDelay": 1500,
  "maxConcurrency": 1,
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": false }
}

Parameter reference

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
searchUrls	array<string>	[]	Pre-built BBB search URLs. When provided, keyword / location / country / sort are ignored and the actor walks each URL through maxPages. Use this when you already have a curated BBB URL list.
keyword	string	roofing contractor	Business type, profession, or company-name query. Examples: plumber, HVAC, home builder, electrician, moving company, auto repair, dentist, mortgage broker, tree service.
location	string	Dallas, TX	City + state, state only, or ZIP / postal code. Examples: Houston, TX, California, 90210, Toronto, ON, Vancouver, BC.
country	string enum	USA	USA for the United States, CAN for Canada. Drives the find_country query param.
accreditedOnly	boolean	false	When true, filters out any listing that is not BBB Accredited.
sort	string enum	Relevance	Sort order for search results: Relevance, Rating, Distance, or Name.
scrapeDetails	boolean	false	When true, the actor opens every business profile page and fills complaints, reviews, owner, license numbers, social media, business start date, employee count, and full address. Adds ~3–6 seconds per business.
maxResults	integer	100	Hard cap on total businesses saved. 0 means unlimited.
maxPages	integer	10	Maximum search pages walked per task. Each page = ~20 results.
requestDelay	integer (ms)	1500	Base delay between requests. Random jitter of 0–1000 ms is added on top. Keep ≥ 1000 ms to avoid blocks.
maxConcurrency	integer	1	Parallel browser pages. Max 3. BBB rate-limits aggressively — leave at 1 unless you have residential proxies and are willing to monitor for blocks.
proxyConfiguration	object	{ useApifyProxy: false }	Standard Apify proxy block. Residential proxies strongly recommended for runs above ~50 businesses or whenever you see Cloudflare challenge loops.

---

Output Schema

Every record is a flat JSON object so it can be loaded directly into a CRM, warehouse, spreadsheet, or BI tool without per-field branching. Fields that were not present on a given profile come back as null (so the schema is stable across listing-only and detail-enriched runs).

Identity fields

Field	Type	Description
businessName	string	Company / DBA name as displayed by BBB
profileUrl	string	Canonical BBB profile URL (sub-pages stripped)
bbbId	string	BBB's stable business identifier (trailing digits in the profile slug)

Trust signals

Field	Type	Description
bbbRating	string	Letter grade — one of A+, A, A-, B+, B, B-, C+, C, C-, D+, D, D-, F, or NR (no rating)
isAccredited	boolean	true if the page shows "BBB Accredited Business since…", false if explicitly "Not BBB Accredited", null if undetermined
accreditationSince	string	Accreditation start date as printed on the profile (e.g. 5/12/2017, March 2009, 2003)

Contact fields

Field	Type	Description
address	string	Street address as reported to BBB
city	string	City
state	string	Two-letter US state or Canadian province abbreviation
zipCode	string	ZIP code (5 or 9 digits, US) or postal code (Canada)
phone	string	Business phone number — pulled from tel: link, JSON-LD, or visible text
email	string	Business contact email — Cloudflare-obfuscated emails are decoded
website	string	Business website URL (BBB redirect URLs and share links filtered out)

Categorization

Field	Type	Description
categories	array<string>	BBB business categories (e.g. ["Roofing Contractors", "Construction"])
serviceAreas	array<string>	Cities / regions the business reports serving

Firmographics

Field	Type	Description
yearsInBusiness	integer	Computed from businessStartDate
businessStartDate	string	Date the business reports having started (e.g. 1/1/2008)
businessType	string	Legal structure — LLC, Corporation, Sole Proprietorship, Partnership, Inc, LP, LLP
numberOfEmployees	string	Employee count band as printed on BBB (e.g. 25 to 50, 5)
ownerName	string	Owner / principal / management contact name
licenseNumbers	array<string>	License numbers the business has registered with BBB

Reputation

Field	Type	Description
complaintsTotal	integer	All-time BBB complaints closed for the business
complaintsLast3Yrs	integer	BBB complaints closed in the last 3 years
complaintsLast12Mo	integer	BBB complaints closed in the last 12 months
complaintsResolved	integer	BBB complaints resolved to the customer's satisfaction
reviewCount	integer	Number of customer reviews submitted on BBB
averageReviewRating	number	Average customer review score (1.0 – 5.0)

Channels & narratives

Field	Type	Description
socialMedia	object	{ facebook, linkedin, twitter, instagram } — only the business's own accounts
governmentActions	string	Free-text summary of government / regulatory actions noted on the profile
description	string	"About this business" narrative

Provenance

Field	Type	Description
searchKeyword	string	The keyword used to find this business
searchLocation	string	The location used to find this business
scrapedAt	string	ISO-8601 timestamp of extraction

Example: search-only record (scrapeDetails: false)

{
  "businessName": "Skyline Roofing & Solar",
  "profileUrl": "https://www.bbb.org/us/tx/dallas/profile/roofing-contractors/skyline-roofing-solar-0875-90719612",
  "bbbId": "90719612",
  "bbbRating": "A+",
  "isAccredited": true,
  "accreditationSince": null,
  "address": "5050 Quorum Dr Ste 700",
  "city": "Dallas",
  "state": "TX",
  "zipCode": "75254",
  "phone": "+1 214 555 0142",
  "email": null,
  "website": null,
  "categories": ["Roofing Contractors", "Solar Energy Contractors"],
  "serviceAreas": null,
  "yearsInBusiness": null,
  "businessStartDate": null,
  "businessType": null,
  "numberOfEmployees": null,
  "ownerName": null,
  "licenseNumbers": null,
  "complaintsTotal": null,
  "complaintsLast3Yrs": null,
  "complaintsLast12Mo": null,
  "complaintsResolved": null,
  "reviewCount": null,
  "averageReviewRating": null,
  "socialMedia": null,
  "governmentActions": null,
  "description": null,
  "searchKeyword": "roofing contractor",
  "searchLocation": "Dallas, TX",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-05-16T14:22:11.401Z"
}

Example: fully enriched record (scrapeDetails: true)

{
  "businessName": "Northstar HVAC Services LLC",
  "profileUrl": "https://www.bbb.org/us/az/phoenix/profile/heating-and-air-conditioning/northstar-hvac-services-1126-99999001",
  "bbbId": "99999001",
  "bbbRating": "A",
  "isAccredited": true,
  "accreditationSince": "3/14/2014",
  "address": "2400 W Camelback Rd Ste 210",
  "city": "Phoenix",
  "state": "AZ",
  "zipCode": "85015",
  "phone": "+1 602 555 0188",
  "email": "service@northstar-hvac.example",
  "website": "https://northstar-hvac.example",
  "categories": ["Heating and Air Conditioning", "Air Duct Cleaning", "Furnace Repair"],
  "serviceAreas": ["Phoenix", "Scottsdale", "Tempe", "Mesa", "Glendale", "Chandler"],
  "yearsInBusiness": 17,
  "businessStartDate": "1/1/2008",
  "businessType": "LLC",
  "numberOfEmployees": "25 to 50",
  "ownerName": "Maria S. Alvarez",
  "licenseNumbers": ["ROC 99999", "ROC 99998"],
  "complaintsTotal": 12,
  "complaintsLast3Yrs": 7,
  "complaintsLast12Mo": 2,
  "complaintsResolved": 6,
  "reviewCount": 184,
  "averageReviewRating": 4.6,
  "socialMedia": {
    "facebook": "https://www.facebook.com/northstarhvacaz",
    "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/northstar-hvac",
    "instagram": "https://www.instagram.com/northstar.hvac/"
  },
  "governmentActions": null,
  "description": "Full-service residential and commercial HVAC contractor serving the Phoenix metro since 2008. NATE-certified technicians, 24/7 emergency service.",
  "searchKeyword": "HVAC",
  "searchLocation": "Phoenix, AZ",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-05-16T14:25:48.117Z"
}

---

BBB Rating Reference

BBB issues a single letter-grade rating per business on a 13-point scale plus a "not rated" bucket. The rating is computed from complaint history, transparency of the business, time in operation, government action, advertising practices, and licensing.

Investment-grade ratings (low risk, default vendor whitelist)

Rating	Meaning
A+	Top score — clean complaint history + transparent + tenured
A	Excellent — minor blemishes but resolved
A-	Very good — small number of unresolved items

Sub-investment ratings (still operating, vet manually)

Rating	Meaning
B+ / B / B-	Above average — review complaint themes before engagement
C+ / C / C-	Average — pattern of complaints or limited transparency
D+ / D / D-	Poor — recurring unresolved complaints, government action, or short history

Distressed (high risk, recommend exclude)

Rating	Meaning
F	Worst rating — pattern of unresolved complaints, fraud allegations, or refusal to engage with BBB
NR	Not Rated — insufficient information or business too new

Accreditation vs. Rating

The two are independent: a business can be A+ and not accredited (didn't apply / didn't pay) or B- and accredited (passed standards review even with mixed complaint history). Use both bbbRating and isAccredited to score risk.

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Use Cases

B2B Lead Generation (Local Services)

Companies selling into the trades — software vendors, payment processors, lead-gen networks, equipment suppliers, insurance brokers — use BBB as a curated source of vetted local-service businesses:

• Pull every roofing contractor in Dallas-Fort Worth with rating ≥ A- for a SaaS roofing CRM sales push
• Build a HVAC TAM list for every metro you target by running 20+ keyword × city pairs in one schedule
• Enrich CRM accounts (Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Close) with BBB rating, accreditation, complaint counts, and owner name
• Filter outbound to accredited businesses only by setting accreditedOnly: true — instantly higher reply rates because the prospects have already paid to be vetted
• Score lead quality in your scoring model using complaintsLast3Yrs / yearsInBusiness as a normalized friction signal
• Route territory by ZIP using the zipCode and city fields exactly as they appear on BBB
• Tier accounts — A+ accredited & 10+ years in business → enterprise team; B rated & <3 years → SMB self-serve

Business Credit & Risk Analysis

Trade-credit insurers, factoring companies, BNPL providers, alt-data scoring shops, and KYB platforms use BBB data as a soft-but-pervasive trust signal:

• Build a daily watchlist of every counterparty in your portfolio and re-pull BBB to detect rating downgrades
• Flag spikes in complaintsLast12Mo as an early-warning signal of operational distress
• Combine with SAM.gov, TTB and state licensing data to build a multi-source trust score
• Validate ownership during onboarding by cross-referencing ownerName against operating-agreement filings
• Detect newly accredited businesses in your target ICP for credit upsells
• Quantify reputation tail risk by joining bbbRating × complaintsTotal × governmentActions into a single score
• Provide adverse-media surrogate for borrowers without traditional bureau coverage

Reputation Monitoring & Brand Protection

Brands, franchise HQs, and managed-service providers use this actor to watch their own and competitor reputation:

• Monitor every franchise location of a multi-location brand for rating drops, new complaints, or accreditation lapses
• Diff weekly snapshots to catch new complaints within 7 days of filing
• Benchmark against competitors in the same metro and category
• Trigger PR / customer-care workflows when complaintsLast12Mo crosses a threshold
• Audit franchisee compliance with brand standards by tracking license numbers and governmentActions
• Feed Power BI dashboards that show rating drift per location per month

M&A Due Diligence (Lower-Middle-Market Services Roll-Ups)

PE firms and search funds rolling up local services (HVAC, plumbing, roofing, pest control, auto repair, vet clinics, home health) lean on BBB as a free, pre-acquisition diligence layer:

• Screen targets in a metro by pulling every A and A+ rated business in the trade
• Reject targets with F ratings or governmentActions content before spending hours on a CIM
• Quantify complaint exposure for any LOI candidate before committing capital
• Verify years in business against seller-provided figures
• Identify the owner / principal for direct cold outreach (LP-funded search funds rely on this heavily)
• Build sector heatmaps showing density and quality of providers per ZIP for thesis building

Journalism, Watchdog & Complaint Investigations

Investigative reporters, consumer-protection columnists, and state attorney-general offices use BBB to surface patterns of consumer harm:

• Identify clusters of high-complaint businesses in a single category and metro (e.g. moving scams, debt-relief mills, solar door-knockers, timeshare exit firms)
• Track government-action narratives across hundreds of businesses to spot serial offenders rebranded under new entities
• Quantify "F"-rated business density by neighborhood for accountability journalism
• Combine with TTB alcohol permittees, SAM.gov entities, and state licensing scrapers to build full corporate-shell maps
• Build a complaint-spike alert that fires when any local business breaches a threshold

Contractor & Vendor Vetting

Property managers, REITs, facility managers, insurance adjusters, and corporate procurement teams use BBB during contractor selection:

• Pre-approve vendors by requiring rating ≥ B+ and isAccredited === true
• Automate panel refresh with a scheduled run every 30 days that re-validates every contractor
• Cross-reference license numbers between BBB and state licensing scrapers (Arizona ROC, NC GC Board, Washington L&I, California DCA) for credentials sanity-check
• Push results to a Make.com / Zapier flow that issues / revokes vendor portal access automatically
• Maintain a per-property "approved trades" list with daily-fresh ratings

Compliance & Anti-Fraud Operations

Marketplaces, payment platforms, and KYB-driven onboarding teams use BBB data as one signal among several:

• Block onboarding for merchants with F ratings or active governmentActions
• Manual review queue triggered by complaintsLast12Mo > N
• Risk segmentation for chargeback monitoring — high-rating accredited merchants get faster settlement
• Build merchant-risk profiles that combine BBB with SAM.gov debarment, OFAC, and state licensing scrapes
• Post-incident retro — diff the BBB snapshot from before vs. after a chargeback storm

Market Research & Competitive Intelligence

Strategy consultants, market-research firms, and corporate strategy teams use the dataset to size local-service markets:

• Count active accredited businesses per category per metro to size TAM
• Track competitor counts over time (run the same query monthly, diff the dataset)
• Map rating distribution — what percentage of plumbers in Atlanta are A-rated vs. B vs. unaccredited?
• Quantify market consolidation by tracking owner-name uniqueness over many businesses
• Geographic expansion modeling — pull 50 metros in one schedule, normalize, plot rating × density

Insurance Underwriting (Small Commercial)

Carriers underwriting GL, BOP, E&O, or workers-comp for small contractors use BBB as a free underwriting overlay:

• Auto-decline quotes for F-rated applicants
• Surcharge quotes where complaintsLast3Yrs > 5
• Validate years in business during quote bind
• Re-check at renewal — schedule a monthly refresh against your in-force book

Academic & Public-Policy Research

Researchers studying small-business dynamics, consumer protection, and local labor markets use BBB as a free, structured panel:

• Study churn by snapshotting the dataset quarterly and comparing
• Analyze complaint patterns across demographics and ZIP codes
• Quantify accreditation impact on consumer-review volume
• Compare US vs. Canadian business norms by running both country: "USA" and country: "CAN"

---

Sample Queries & Recipes

Recipe 1 — Top-rated roofing contractors in Texas metros (lead-gen TAM)

{
  "searchUrls": [
    "https://www.bbb.org/search?find_text=roofing+contractor&find_loc=Houston%2C+TX&find_country=USA",
    "https://www.bbb.org/search?find_text=roofing+contractor&find_loc=Dallas%2C+TX&find_country=USA",
    "https://www.bbb.org/search?find_text=roofing+contractor&find_loc=Austin%2C+TX&find_country=USA",
    "https://www.bbb.org/search?find_text=roofing+contractor&find_loc=San+Antonio%2C+TX&find_country=USA"
  ],
  "accreditedOnly": true,
  "sort": "Rating",
  "scrapeDetails": true,
  "maxResults": 0,
  "maxPages": 10,
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true, "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"] }
}

Recipe 2 — HVAC TAM across the southwest US (no detail enrichment for speed)

{
  "keyword": "HVAC",
  "location": "Arizona",
  "country": "USA",
  "scrapeDetails": false,
  "maxResults": 500,
  "maxPages": 25
}

Recipe 3 — Canadian general contractors in Greater Toronto

{
  "keyword": "general contractor",
  "location": "Toronto, ON",
  "country": "CAN",
  "accreditedOnly": false,
  "scrapeDetails": true,
  "maxResults": 200
}

Recipe 4 — High-risk movers nationwide (journalism / consumer protection)

{
  "keyword": "moving company",
  "location": "United States",
  "country": "USA",
  "sort": "Rating",
  "scrapeDetails": true,
  "maxResults": 1000,
  "maxPages": 50
}

Then post-filter in your stack:

high_risk = [
    r for r in records
    if r["bbbRating"] in ("F", "D-", "D", "D+")
    or (r.get("complaintsLast12Mo") or 0) > 5
]

Recipe 5 — Reputation watch for a specific brand's franchise network

{
  "keyword": "ABC Plumbing",
  "location": "United States",
  "country": "USA",
  "scrapeDetails": true,
  "maxResults": 0,
  "maxPages": 20
}

Schedule this nightly; diff bbbRating and complaintsLast12Mo against yesterday's run.

Recipe 6 — Test sample (10 records to validate filters before a big run)

{
  "keyword": "electrician",
  "location": "90210",
  "country": "USA",
  "scrapeDetails": true,
  "maxResults": 10,
  "maxPages": 1
}

Recipe 7 — Auto-dealer vetting with full enrichment in Chicago

{
  "keyword": "used car dealer",
  "location": "Chicago, IL",
  "country": "USA",
  "accreditedOnly": true,
  "sort": "Rating",
  "scrapeDetails": true,
  "maxResults": 300,
  "maxPages": 15,
  "requestDelay": 3000,
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true, "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"] }
}

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Integration Examples

Google Sheets

1. Create an Apify schedule that runs this actor once a week with your TAM keywords
2. Add the "Save to Google Sheets" Apify integration to the schedule
3. Every Monday morning, a fresh sheet of BBB-vetted leads appears in your Drive — append-mode keeps history

Make.com / Zapier / n8n

The Apify connector exists on every major automation platform. Common BBB triggers:

• New A+ accredited business in $METRO → push to Slack #sales channel
• Rating downgrade for any account in CRM → create a HubSpot Task for the account owner
• complaintsLast12Mo spike → email the customer-success team
• New governmentActions text → page the compliance officer

Power BI / Tableau / Looker

Pull the Apify dataset via the REST API as a custom data source. Refresh on the actor's schedule. Dashboards we have seen built on this data:

• Rating distribution heatmap per metro per category
• Complaint velocity (complaintsLast12Mo / yearsInBusiness) per ZIP
• Accredited vs. non-accredited share over time
• Top 20 worst-rated businesses per state, refreshed weekly

Postgres / Snowflake / BigQuery

Use Apify's webhook integration to POST the dataset URL to your warehouse ingestion endpoint after every run. The flat JSON schema maps cleanly to a single bbb_businesses table; treat bbbId as a natural key for upserts.

CREATE TABLE bbb_businesses (
  bbb_id              TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
  business_name       TEXT,
  bbb_rating          TEXT,
  is_accredited       BOOLEAN,
  accreditation_since TEXT,
  city                TEXT,
  state               TEXT,
  zip_code            TEXT,
  phone               TEXT,
  website             TEXT,
  categories          TEXT[],
  years_in_business   INTEGER,
  owner_name          TEXT,
  complaints_total    INTEGER,
  complaints_3yrs     INTEGER,
  complaints_12mo     INTEGER,
  review_count        INTEGER,
  avg_review_rating   NUMERIC(2,1),
  scraped_at          TIMESTAMPTZ
);

Salesforce / HubSpot / Pipedrive CRM Enrichment

Trigger a scheduled run nightly, then upsert against Account records keyed on bbbId (preferred) or website (fallback). Rating-change events can create Tasks, fire Workflows, or update Lead Scores automatically.

Webhook fan-out

Apify can POST the run's dataset directly to any HTTPS endpoint. Use this to push fresh BBB data into your own backend, a Lambda, a Cloud Function, or a worker queue without polling.

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Major US & Canadian Markets Covered

BBB lists businesses in every metro across the United States and Canada. The table below highlights the markets most commonly queried by users of this actor — but the actor works for any city or postal code BBB indexes.

Market	Country	Why this metro shows up so often
New York, NY	USA	Largest small-business pool in the US; high inbound from B2B SaaS teams
Los Angeles, CA	USA	Massive home-services TAM; contractor due diligence
Chicago, IL	USA	Strong financial services + trades coverage
Houston, TX	USA	Energy services, HVAC, roofing — high storm-claim volume
Dallas–Fort Worth, TX	USA	Default keyword + location for trades lead-gen
Phoenix, AZ	USA	HVAC capital of the US; pairs cleanly with the Arizona ROC scraper
Atlanta, GA	USA	Logistics, moving, home services — high complaint-investigation use
Miami, FL	USA	Real estate services, hurricane-zone contractors
Seattle, WA	USA	Pairs with the Washington L&I contractor scraper
Denver, CO	USA	Pairs with the Colorado professional license scraper
Boston, MA	USA	Professional services, education-adjacent
Washington, DC	USA	Government-services adjacent companies
Toronto, ON	CAN	Largest Canadian metro; default country: "CAN" test
Vancouver, BC	CAN	West-coast trades + property management
Montréal, QC	CAN	French-language listings still parse cleanly
Calgary, AB	CAN	Energy services + home builders
Ottawa, ON	CAN	Federal-services adjacency
Edmonton, AB	CAN	Trades, contractors

The country input toggles between USA and CAN; the location input accepts city + state/province, state/province alone, or ZIP / postal code.

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Cost & Performance

Metric	Value
Engine	Playwright Chromium (headed mode under xvfb) + Cheerio
Auth required	None (no BBB account, no API key)
Proxy required	Recommended for production runs (RESIDENTIAL group)
Concurrency	Default 1; max 3 — BBB rate-limits aggressively
Memory footprint	1024 MB minimum, 4096 MB cap (browser overhead)
Search-only runtime	~5–10 seconds per 20-result page
Detail-enriched runtime	~5–10 seconds per business profile (add requestDelay)
Data freshness	Live at run time — exactly what BBB serves the moment you scrape
Pricing model	Pay-per-event (transparent per-record pricing)
Cost per 100 search-only records	typically pennies
Cost per 100 fully enriched records	varies with requestDelay and proxy use
Output formats	JSON, CSV, Excel, HTML, XML, RSS, JSON Lines

Tuning tip: if you only need name + rating + accreditation + city for lead scoring, leave scrapeDetails: false. You will get 20× the throughput. Flip to true only for the high-value records you actually need to enrich.

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Compliance, Privacy & Legal Notes

• Public data only — every field this actor returns is published on www.bbb.org and visible to any visitor without login
• No PII beyond business listings — ownerName is the public principal contact the business itself filed with BBB
• No PHI — BBB is a business directory, not a healthcare system; no patient data is in scope
• No SSNs, DOBs, or financial credentials are extracted or available
• Email addresses are pulled from publicly displayed mailto: links and Cloudflare-obfuscated data-cfemail attributes that BBB has chosen to display; share-link mailto:?body= URLs are explicitly filtered out
• Robots & ToS — review BBB's Terms of Use before commercial redistribution of the data; the actor is provided as a self-service tool for the operator to use within those terms
• Rate limits — the actor's default requestDelay and maxConcurrency are intentionally conservative to minimize load on BBB's infrastructure
• GDPR / CCPA / CASL — compliance with downstream marketing, telemarketing, and email regulations (CAN-SPAM, TCPA, CASL, GDPR) is the responsibility of the data consumer; BBB profile contact info is not consent to be marketed to
• No bulk redistribution of BBB's proprietary rating methodology is intended; the actor surfaces the rating value, not BBB's underlying algorithm
• Compliance use cases are explicitly supported — vendor onboarding, KYB, and risk monitoring are well within reasonable commercial use of public directory data

Important: BBB data may not be used for unlawful purposes including identity fraud, stalking, harassment, or coordinated review manipulation. Use the data as a trust signal, not as a substitute for direct due diligence.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How fresh is the data?

Live at run time. Every record reflects exactly what BBB.org was serving at the moment the actor scraped it. There is no cache layer between you and BBB — if a rating changed an hour ago, the next run reflects it.

Does the actor handle BBB's Cloudflare protection?

Yes. That is the single biggest technical lift this actor solves. It launches a real Chromium browser in headed mode under Apify's xvfb display, applies stealth init scripts (navigator.webdriver = undefined, window.chrome.runtime stub), and waits up to 30 seconds per page for the Cloudflare challenge to clear before extracting HTML.

Do I need a BBB account or API key?

No. BBB does not publish a public API. This actor scrapes the public website that any visitor can browse, without login.

Do I need proxies?

For small runs (under ~30 businesses) you can run without proxies and usually succeed. For anything larger, or for production reliability, residential proxies are strongly recommended. Pass proxyConfiguration: { useApifyProxy: true, apifyProxyGroups: ["RESIDENTIAL"] } in your input.

How many records will I get per run?

You control it with maxResults (default 100, set 0 for unlimited) and maxPages (default 10, each page = ~20 results). BBB's own pagination caps deep results in any single query; if you need very large datasets, split the query across multiple searchUrls (different keyword × location pairs).

Does this work for Canada?

Yes. Set country: "CAN" and pass a Canadian location (e.g. "Toronto, ON", "Vancouver, BC", "Montréal, QC"). The actor follows BBB's find_country=CAN URL pattern automatically.

Does it scrape BBB complaints in full text?

It extracts complaint counts — total, last-3-years, last-12-months, resolved — directly from the profile page. Full complaint narratives are not included by default; BBB shows them on separate paginated sub-pages and they fall outside the schema.

Does it include customer reviews?

Review count and average rating are included. Individual review text is not in the dataset schema.

Can I filter to BBB Accredited businesses only?

Yes — set accreditedOnly: true and the actor drops any listing that explicitly marks "Not BBB Accredited".

How do I sort by rating?

Set sort: "Rating". Other valid values are Relevance (default), Distance, and Name.

Can I run multiple keyword × location queries in one run?

Yes — provide an array in searchUrls. Each URL is walked independently up to maxPages and the results are merged into a single dataset.

Can I use this on the Apify Free Plan?

Yes — every feature works on the free tier. Test with maxResults: 5 to validate your filters before committing to a larger run.

Can I schedule it?

Yes. Apify's built-in Scheduler supports any cron expression. Common schedules:

• Daily watchlist refresh for your CRM accounts
• Weekly TAM rebuild for your territory teams
• Monthly competitor delta diff

Does the actor deduplicate across pages?

Yes. The actor maintains an internal Set keyed on the canonical profile URL and drops duplicates as they appear. Sub-pages (/details, /customer-reviews, etc.) are stripped down to the canonical profile before deduping.

Will it pick up paid ad listings?

No. Search-card links that route through doubleclick.net, adclick, or googleads are filtered out before reaching the dataset.

What if a profile is missing some fields?

The schema is stable — fields that aren't present on a given profile come back as null. This makes downstream ingestion (warehouse, CRM, BI) trivial because the column set never changes between runs.

Why is maxConcurrency capped at 3?

BBB rate-limits aggressively. Running more than 1–3 concurrent browser pages from the same IP almost always triggers temporary blocks. The actor's design favors single-thread + jittered delay + residential proxies over raw parallelism.

Are NAICS codes included?

Not directly — BBB exposes business categories as free text, not NAICS. The categories field is an array of those category strings, which you can map to NAICS in your downstream pipeline.

Can I export to CSV?

Yes — JSON, CSV, Excel, HTML, XML, RSS, and JSON Lines are all available from the Apify dataset view or the dataset items endpoint.

How do I report a bug or request a feature?

Open an issue on the Apify Store actor page or contact the developer directly through the Apify Console. PRs welcome via the Apify version sync.

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Related Apify Actors by Haketa

BBB data is most powerful when joined to other public-business datasets. These sibling actors are commonly used alongside this one for B2B lead generation, KYB, contractor vetting, compliance monitoring, and journalism workflows:

• 🇺🇸 SAM.gov Federal Contractor Entity Scraper — every entity registered to do business with the US federal government, with UEI, CAGE, NAICS, debarment status
• 🇺🇸 TTB Alcohol Permittee Scraper — every federally licensed wholesaler, importer, manufacturer of alcoholic beverages
• 🇺🇸 Texas Pharmacy License Scraper — TSBP — every pharmacist, pharmacy, intern, technician licensed in Texas
• 🇺🇸 Arizona ROC Contractor License Scraper — Arizona Registrar of Contractors
• 🇺🇸 Washington L&I Contractor License Scraper — Washington Labor & Industries contractor registry
• 🇺🇸 North Carolina Licensing Board for General Contractors Scraper
• 🇺🇸 California DCA Professional License Scraper — California Department of Consumer Affairs
• 🇺🇸 Colorado Professional License Scraper — Colorado DORA
• 🇺🇸 Virginia DPOR Professional License Scraper — Virginia regulated occupations
• 🇺🇸 Ohio eLicense Scraper — Ohio professional licenses
• 🇺🇸 Illinois IDFPR License Scraper — Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation
• 🇺🇸 Minnesota DLI Professional License Scraper — Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry

Pattern: pull a BBB dataset for a category + metro, then enrich with the matching state-licensing actor on licenseNumbers or ownerName, then enrich with SAM.gov on entity name. You get a three-source view of every business in your TAM — public reputation (BBB) + regulatory licensure (state board) + federal contracting (SAM.gov) — in three actor runs.

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Comparison vs. Alternatives

Approach	Setup time	Handles Cloudflare	Schema normalization	Cost per 1K records	Compliance log
This actor	< 1 minute	✅ Built-in headed Playwright + stealth + CF wait loop	✅ Flat JSON, stable columns	Pennies on pay-per-event	✅ Automatic
Manual BBB browsing	Hours per session	✅ Human user	❌ Copy/paste hell	Free + your hourly rate	❌ None
requests / axios script	1 hour to fail	❌ 403 from Cloudflare	DIY	Free + your time	❌ None
Headless Puppeteer / Playwright DIY	2–3 days to MVP, ongoing	⚠️ Partial — easily detected without xvfb tricks	DIY	Infra + dev time	❌ None
Paid "BBB data" reseller	Days of contracting	✅	✅	$500–2,000+/mo + per-record	Varies
BBB partner API	Sales cycle	✅	✅	Enterprise pricing only	✅

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Why Pay-Per-Event Pricing?

Most scraping tools charge a flat monthly subscription (you pay even if you don't use it) or per-Compute-Unit (unpredictable). This actor uses pay-per-event, which means:

• ✅ You only pay when the actor runs and produces records
• ✅ Charges scale with how much BBB data you actually consume
• ✅ Transparent, line-item billing inside Apify
• ✅ No monthly minimums and no seat licenses
• ✅ Free to evaluate — sample with maxResults: 5 for pennies
• ✅ Predictable unit economics that map directly to your lead cost or risk-monitoring budget

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Changelog

Version	Date	Notes
1.0	2026-05	Initial public release — headed Playwright + Cloudflare bypass, USA + Canada coverage, search-card and full-detail extraction, BBB rating + accreditation + complaints + reviews + owner + license numbers + social media, pay-per-event pricing

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Keywords

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Support

• 🐛 Bug reports: Use the Issues tab on the Apify Store actor page
• 💡 Feature requests: Same place — please describe your use case so we can prioritize
• 📧 Direct contact: Through the Apify developer profile

If this actor saves you time, a 5-star rating on the Apify Store helps other B2B, compliance, journalism, and reputation-monitoring teams discover it. Thank you!