Business license leads scraper (US and Canada)

Turn official government business licence registers into a clean lead list. This Actor pulls live records from 18 city, county and state open data portals across the United States and Canada, normalizes wildly different column names into one shared schema, and hands you a table you can import straight into a CRM.

Every source is a public government dataset. No API key, no account, no cookies, no captcha.

Why licence data sells

A newly issued business licence is one of the strongest buying signals there is. A restaurant that just got its food licence needs a POS, an accountant, insurance, signage, a supplier, a website. A new roofing contractor needs a truck wrap and lead flow. Filter by issue date, get the businesses that appeared this month, and you are talking to them before anyone else.

What you get per record

Field	Description
businessName	Legal entity name on the licence
tradeName	DBA or trading name
businessActivity	What the business actually does, as recorded by the city
licenseType	Licence category
licenseStatus	Active, issued, renewal due, and similar
naicsCode, naicsDescription	Industry classification where the register carries it
ownerName	Owner or applicant, where published
phone, email	Contact details, where published
address, city, state, zip, fullAddress	Business location
latitude, longitude	Coordinates, where published
issueDate, expirationDate	Licence dates, normalized to YYYY-MM-DD
licenseNumber	Licence or account number
sourceName, source, country, portalUrl	Which register the row came from

Not every register publishes every field. Phone numbers come through on New York City, Seattle, New Orleans and Gainesville. Emails come through on Gainesville. Coordinates come through on most of the bigger cities.

Jurisdictions covered

United States: Chicago IL, New York City NY, Seattle WA, Los Angeles CA, San Francisco CA, New Orleans LA, Denver CO, Kansas City MO, Berkeley CA, Marin County CA, Norfolk VA, Providence RI, Gainesville FL, Everett WA, and the state of Delaware.

Canada: Calgary AB, Edmonton AB, Winnipeg MB.

Input

{
    "sources": ["chicago", "new-york-city", "seattle"],
    "searchTerm": "restaurant",
    "issuedSince": "2026-06-01",
    "maxItems": 500,
    "sortNewestFirst": true
}

• sources picks the registers to read. Leave it alone for a solid default across five large cities.
• searchTerm is a full text search over every column of the register. Good values: restaurant, salon, roofing, daycare, contractor, tobacco, liquor, landscaping, or a company name.
• issuedSince keeps licences issued on or after that date. This is the new-business filter.
• sortNewestFirst orders each register by issue date and drops blank or future-dated records.
• includeRawRecord adds the untouched source record under raw if you want columns this Actor does not map.

How it works

The Actor talks to each portal's Socrata Open Data API, pages through results 1,000 rows at a time, applies the keyword and date filters server side, and retries with backoff on rate limits. It waits a quarter second between pages so it stays a polite client. Dates arrive in at least four different formats across these portals and all of them come out as YYYY-MM-DD. Phone numbers arrive as raw digit strings and come out formatted, with placeholder numbers like 0000000000 dropped.

Good uses

• Local B2B prospecting: insurance, accounting, POS, payroll, signage, web design, commercial cleaning
• Franchise and site selection research
• Competitive tracking in a city or trade
• Market sizing by activity type or NAICS code
• Enriching an existing CRM with licence status and expiry dates

Notes

All data is published by the issuing government under its own open data terms and is already public. The Actor only reads published datasets and does not touch anything behind a login.

Some registers refresh nightly, others weekly or monthly, so the freshest issue date varies by city. Registers without an issue date column (Denver, Kansas City, Berkeley) return their natural order and ignore the date filter.