World Cities & Regions Scraper (GeoDB)

Search a database of world cities and get clean, structured records with population, coordinates, region, country code and timezone — plus a full country list. Powered by the keyless GeoDB free service, so there is no API key to manage. Great for location autocomplete, market sizing, logistics routing and travel apps.

Pricing is pay-as-you-go and typically lands around ~$0.50 per 1,000 records.

What you get

Every city record:

Field	Example
name	Santiago
country / country_code	Chile / CL
region / region_code	Santiago Metropolitan / RM
population	6257516
latitude / longitude	-33.44 / -70.65
timezone	America__Santiago (with enrichDetail)
elevation_m	520 (with enrichDetail)
wikidata_id / url	Q2887 / https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2887

Modes

• cities — searchable city list. Filter by namePrefix, countryCode and minPopulation. Sorted by population (largest first).
• countries — the GeoDB country list with currency_codes.

Input

Property	Type	Default	Description
mode	select	cities	cities or countries.
namePrefix	string	—	Cities only. Name starts-with filter, e.g. San.
countryCode	string	—	Cities only. 2-letter ISO code, e.g. DE.
minPopulation	integer	0	Cities only. Minimum inhabitants, e.g. 500000.
enrichDetail	boolean	false	Cities only. One extra call per city for timezone + elevation_m.
maxItems	integer	200	Max records (hard cap 2000).

Example input

{
  "mode": "cities",
  "namePrefix": "San",
  "minPopulation": 500000,
  "maxItems": 100
}

Example output

{
  "type": "city",
  "city_id": 7118,
  "wikidata_id": "Q64",
  "name": "Berlin",
  "country": "Germany",
  "country_code": "DE",
  "region": "Berlin",
  "region_code": "BE",
  "latitude": 52.51,
  "longitude": 13.38,
  "population": 3913644,
  "elevation_m": null,
  "timezone": null,
  "url": "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q64",
  "source": "geodb",
  "scraped_at": "2026-08-11T00:00:00+00:00"
}

Free-host rate limit

This actor uses the keyless GeoDB free service host, which rate-limits to roughly 1 request per second. The actor paces requests (~1.1s) and handles HTTP 429 responses gracefully. Because of this, keep enrichDetail off for large pulls — it adds one request per city. For very high volumes, consider the paid GeoDB RapidAPI tier.

How this differs from our other location actors

This is a searchable world CITIES database — you query by name / country / population and get city-level facts (population, coordinates, region, timezone). It answers "which cities match X, and how big are they?". Our related actors solve different problems:

• zip-code-scraper — postal/ZIP code lookups (ZIP → place, or place → ZIPs).
• geocoding-scraper — address ↔ coordinates geocoding & reverse geocoding.
• country-profiles-scraper — one rich profile per country (flags, capital, languages, currencies, borders), not city-level data.
• postal-code-scraper — bulk postal-code datasets.

Use this actor when you need cities with population and coordinates, not per-address geocoding or per-country profiles.

Use cases

• Location autocomplete — power a city picker with namePrefix.
• Market sizing — pull all cities above a population threshold per country.
• Logistics & routing — city coordinates and regions for coverage planning.
• Travel apps — timezones, coordinates and Wikidata links for destinations.

Related actors

• geocoding-scraper
• zip-code-scraper
• country-profiles-scraper
• postal-code-scraper