BBB Scraper — Better Business Bureau business data, ratings & complaints

Scrape business profiles from the Better Business Bureau (bbb.org) across the United States and Canada: BBB letter rating, accreditation status and date, complaints and customer reviews closed, years in business, legal entity type, owners and officers, phone, website, full address and coordinates.

76 fields per business. Most BBB scrapers return the ~20 fields BBB's search box gives away. This one also reads the profile page, where the other 35 live.

BBB has no public API. This actor is the practical substitute: a BBB business data API you can call from the Apify API, a scheduler, Make, n8n, Zapier, or your own code, with the output shaped as one clean row per business.

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What one row looks like

{
  "business_name": "Al Mac Plumbing & Gas, LLC",
  "legal_name": "Al Mac Plumbing & Gas, LLC",
  "category_name": "Plumber",
  "category_id": "10113-000",
  "categories": [{ "tob_id": "10113-000", "name": "Plumber" }],
  "rating": "A+",
  "rating_score": 100,
  "is_accredited": true,
  "accreditation_date": "2024-12-02",
  "complaints_closed_3y": 0,
  "complaints_closed_12m": 0,
  "reviews_total": 1,
  "review_average_stars": 5,
  "years_in_business": 5,
  "type_of_entity": "Limited Liability Company (LLC)",
  "business_started": "2020-05-01",
  "bbb_file_opened": "2021-03-15",
  "principals": [{ "name": "Mr. Alex McCarra", "title": "Managing Member" }],
  "phone": ["(512) 555-0123"],
  "phone_e164": ["+15125550123"],
  "website": "https://www.almacatxplumbing.com/",
  "address": "10415 Old Manchaca Rd Ste 205",
  "city": "Austin",
  "state": "TX",
  "postal_code": "78748-1448",
  "latitude": 30.3,
  "longitude": -97.76,
  "service_areas_summary": ["78730", "78731", "78732"],
  "accepts_quote_requests": true,
  "has_service_area": true,
  "is_multi_location": false,
  "locations": [],
  "report_url": "https://www.bbb.org/us/tx/austin/profile/plumber/al-mac-plumbing-gas-llc-0825-1000194310"
}

(Phone replaced with a 555-01xx number, which is reserved for fiction. This page does not reproduce anyone's real contact details.)

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What you can do with it

• Build B2B lead lists of local service businesses — plumbers, roofers, HVAC, electricians, general contractors, movers, dentists, lawyers, auto repair — by city, state or trade, with phone, website and address ready for a CRM.
• Screen vendors and suppliers before you sign: BBB rating, accreditation, how many complaints closed in the last 3 years and last 12 months, years in business, legal entity type and whether the business is still trading.
• Enrich a CRM you already have: match on name + city and append rating, complaints, years in business and owners.
• Track a market: run it on a schedule and watch ratings, accreditation and complaint counts move.
• Feed an AI agent or a RAG index with structured business-trust data instead of scraped HTML.

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Fill rates — measured, with their sample size

Nothing is promised here without a number next to it. Listing fields were measured on 1,411 businesses; profile fields on 120 profiles sampled from BBB's own sitemap.

Field	Fill rate
name, city, state, ZIP, category, coordinates, ids, profile URL	100%
rating, accreditation, complaints closed (3y and 12m), reviews total, average stars	100%
years in business, legal entity type, BBB file opened, local BBB, every location	100%
categories — every category BBB assigns, not just the primary one	100%
accepts quote requests · has service area	100%
phone	97.5%
address	87.5%
business started	82.5%
service areas (counties/ZIPs served)	73%
owners and officers	71.7%
website	53.3%
logo	36.3%
incorporation date	35%
accreditation date	22.5%
alternate trading names	18.3%
products and services · business description	14.2% · 11.7%

Four fields BBB returns are empty in 0% of the sample (score, outOfBusinessStatus, serviceAreaDescription, accreditationStatus). They are not in the output, because a field that is always empty is not a feature.

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🔴 The thing nobody tells you about BBB data

BBB's search box is not BBB's directory. Measured: businesses returned by BBB's own search are 96.7% accredited and 90.8% rated A+. A sample taken from BBB's full profile sitemap is 0% accredited, 47.5% A+ and 45% not rated.

That is the difference between BBB's paying shop window and the actual market. A dataset built only from the search box will tell you every plumber in town is A+ accredited. This actor reads BBB's own sitemaps — 575 files of 10,000 profiles each, about 5.75 million businesses — so it can hand you the rest of the directory too.

If you want only the accredited ones, that is what onlyAccredited is for, and it is a real filter: on Austin plumbers it goes from 2,409 businesses to 505.

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Example runs

1. BBB plumbers in Austin, TX

{ "searchTerms": ["plumber"], "locations": ["Austin, TX"], "maxItems": 500 }

2. BBB Accredited roofing contractors in Chicago, IL

{ "searchTerms": ["roofing contractors"], "locations": ["Chicago, IL"], "onlyAccredited": true, "maxItems": 500 }

3. HVAC contractors across Texas, with complaints and ratings

{ "searchTerms": ["air conditioning contractors"], "states": ["TX"], "maxItems": 2000 }

4. General contractors in New York, NY

{ "searchTerms": ["general contractor"], "locations": ["New York, NY"], "maxItems": 1000 }

5. Dentists in Phoenix, AZ with complaint history

{ "searchTerms": ["dentist"], "locations": ["Phoenix, AZ"], "fetchProfiles": true, "maxItems": 500 }

6. Law firms in Los Angeles, CA

{ "searchTerms": ["lawyers"], "locations": ["Los Angeles, CA"], "maxItems": 1000 }

7. A-rated moving companies in Florida

{ "mode": "search", "searchTerms": ["moving companies"], "states": ["FL"], "ratings": ["A"], "maxItems": 500 }

8. Auto repair shops in Houston, TX

{ "searchTerms": ["auto repair"], "locations": ["Houston, TX"], "maxItems": 1000 }

9. Electricians in Atlanta, GA that accept quote requests

{ "mode": "search", "searchTerms": ["electrician"], "locations": ["Atlanta, GA"], "onlyQuoteRequests": true, "maxItems": 300 }

10. Landscaping companies in Miami, FL

{ "searchTerms": ["landscaping"], "locations": ["Miami, FL"], "maxItems": 500 }

11. Pest control businesses in Ontario, Canada

{ "searchTerms": ["pest control"], "states": ["ON"], "country": "CAN", "maxItems": 500 }

12. Restaurants in Philadelphia, PA

{ "searchTerms": ["restaurants"], "locations": ["Philadelphia, PA"], "maxItems": 1000 }

13. Roofers in Dallas, TX rated B or lower

{ "mode": "search", "searchTerms": ["roofing contractors"], "locations": ["Dallas, TX"], "ratings": ["B", "C", "D", "F"], "maxItems": 500 }

14. A slice of the whole California business directory

{ "mode": "sitemap", "states": ["CA"], "maxItems": 2000 }

15. Home improvement contractors in Seattle, WA + category tree

{ "searchTerms": ["home improvement"], "locations": ["Seattle, WA"], "includeCategories": true, "maxItems": 500 }

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Pricing

Pay per event. You are charged for what is delivered, never for a page that failed.

Event	Price
Actor start	$0.00001 — the platform minimum, which is a thousandth of a cent
Business delivered	$0.003
Full profile data added to a business	$0.006
BBB category taxonomy row	$0.00001 — the platform minimum

Apify does not allow an event priced at zero, so the two events that should be free are set to the lowest price the platform accepts. A run of 10,000 businesses pays $0.1 in start and taxonomy events — rounding, not pricing.

A run of 1,000 businesses with full profile data costs $9. Without profile data, $3. Rows that error out are written to a separate errors dataset and are never charged.

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Output

The default dataset has one row per business, with four ready-made views: Overview, Contact (drop straight into a CRM), Trust signals (rating, accreditation, complaints, reviews) and Everything. Export to JSON, CSV, Excel or XML, or pull it from the Apify API.

Two extra datasets: categories (BBB's own taxonomy, when you ask for it) and errors (what could not be fetched, and why).

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Questions people actually ask

Does the Better Business Bureau have a public API? No. BBB does not publish a general business-data API, which is why most teams end up scraping it. This actor gives you the same thing in practice: structured JSON or CSV per business, callable from the Apify API or a schedule.

Can I get BBB reviews and complaint text? No, and that is deliberate. You get the counts and the average star rating — reviews_total, review_average_stars, complaints_closed_3y, complaints_closed_12m, complaints_total — which is what you need to judge a business. The text of reviews and complaints is written by identifiable individuals, and this actor does not republish it.

Can I get business email addresses? No. BBB deliberately obfuscates the email on the page to stop harvesting, and this actor does not undo that. You get has_email (true/false), plus phone and website.

How many businesses can it return? BBB publishes about 5.75 million profiles in its sitemaps, and this actor can reach them. A single run is capped at 50,000 rows, and at whatever you set in maxItems.

How fast is it? Measured on the platform: 500 businesses per minute at concurrency 6, with 0 blocks and 0 timeouts across 1,007 requests.

Which cities and states does it cover? Every US state and Canadian province BBB lists. Filter with locations ("Austin, TX", "Chicago, IL", "New York, NY"…), with states ("TX", "CA", "ON"…), or leave both empty to sweep the directory.

Does "Miami, FL" mean only businesses inside Miami? Usually yes, but not always. The actor reads BBB's own city listing pages, which are strictly that city. When a trade has no listing page on BBB — landscaping and air conditioning contractors are real examples — it falls back to BBB's search, and BBB's search covers the surrounding metro area, so you may see nearby towns. Every row carries city, state and coordinates, so filtering further is one step on your side.

Can I get only BBB Accredited Businesses? Yes — onlyAccredited: true. It uses BBB's own accredited listings rather than a filter parameter that BBB ignores, so the count really does change.

Does it need a login, a proxy or a browser? None of the three. It makes plain HTTP requests to pages BBB serves publicly.

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Notes

• Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Better Business Bureau or the International Association of Better Business Bureaus. BBB and BBB Accredited Business are their trademarks, used here only to say what the data is.
• Only publicly visible information is collected. No login, no session cookies, no CAPTCHA solving.
• Business profiles include names of owners and officers as BBB publishes them — people acting in a professional capacity. In the EU/UK that is personal data and it is your responsibility to have a lawful basis for processing it.
• Customer reviews and complaint texts are not collected. Only their counts.
• Removal requests: privacy@actorstack.dev, answered within 30 days.
• Data reflects BBB at the time of the run. Every row carries fetched_at and from_cache, so you always know how old it is.