How to Get a List of Businesses in Any Area

"Get me a list of businesses in my area" sounds like one task. It is really two, and the second one is where people get stuck.

The first is picking a source. The second is defining what "my area" means in a way a computer can act on, because the area you sell into almost never matches a line on an administrative map.

Where the lists come from

Four sources, each authoritative about something different.

Government business registries. Definitive on legal existence. Poor on whether a company trades today. Dissolved entities linger for years, addresses are registered rather than operational, and the categories are tax classifications rather than what the business actually does.

Chambers of commerce and trade bodies. Small, clean, and self-selecting. Membership implies an established business willing to pay dues, which is a useful filter and a heavy bias. You will miss most of the market.

Online directories. Wide coverage, uneven freshness. Many are recycled from the same underlying feeds, so cross-checking two of them tells you less than it appears to.

Google Maps listings. Maintained by the business itself, which is the important property. A business that moves, closes, or changes its phone number has a reason to fix its listing and no reason to update a directory entry. The trade-off is that anything without a listing is invisible, and the category is the one the owner picked.

For most local prospecting and market work the last one wins on freshness, and it is the only one that carries ratings, review counts, and coordinates in the same row. The rest of this guide uses it.

What a row actually contains

A Maps export gives you, per business: name, category, address, phone, website, rating, review count, latitude and longitude, business status, and price level. Enrichment can add social profiles, the platform the website runs on, and an email address read from that website.

One thing it does not contain is an email field, because Maps has no such field. Anything that promises emails straight from listings is deriving them elsewhere, which we covered in getting emails from Google Maps.

The part that is actually hard: defining the area

Administrative boundaries were drawn for governing, not for selling. A plumber in a large city serves maybe a third of it. A regional distributor covers four towns and the road between them. Neither matches a city record.

There are three ways to scope an area, and they are good at different things.

By country, state, and city

The default, and correct most of the time. You pick a country, then a state or province, then a city. In BasedOnBusiness these resolve against a geographic database, so US.TX is Texas and city names are disambiguated for you rather than guessed from a string.

Use this when your area genuinely is a city or a set of cities. Running the same category across six cities as six searches is simpler than any clever geometry, and easier to hand to someone else.

By an area you draw

When the service area is not a city, draw it. In the dashboard you switch the search to area mode, pick the country the area sits in, and draw the shape on a map. Everything inside the shape is in scope.

This is the right tool for a service radius that is really a drive time, a coastal strip, a motorway corridor, a metro area that spans several municipalities, or half a large city.

The shape is bounded, and the limits are worth knowing before you draw: about 250,000 square kilometres of bounding box, no side longer than roughly 800 km, and at most 1,000 points. Those are generous for any service area and deliberately too small for "the whole country", which is what the country and state fields are for.

By postal code or radius

You cannot, and it is worth understanding why rather than working around it badly.

There is no postal-code input and no radius input. Postal codes are routing units. They split neighbourhoods, merge unrelated ones, and change. A radius is worse: it treats a river, a motorway, and a mountain as though they are not there, so a 10 km circle routinely includes places nobody would drive to and excludes a suburb twelve minutes away.

If you have been handed a list of postal codes, the practical answer is to draw a polygon covering the area they describe, then filter the export on the address column afterwards. If you were given a radius, draw the circle roughly. You will get a better list than the radius would have produced, because you can bend it around the things that actually stop customers.

Every exported row carries latitude and longitude, so any further geographic filtering you need can happen in a spreadsheet or a database after the fact.

A workflow that scales

1. Write down the area in words first. "Everything inside the ring road plus the two towns north of it." This is the step people skip, and it is what determines whether the list is usable.
2. Choose the scoping method. One or more cities means the location fields. Anything else means drawing it.
3. Split by category, not by geography. One job takes up to 10 queries, so run "plumber", "electrician", "HVAC contractor" together over the same area rather than one category over ten areas.
4. Mind the account limits. Two open jobs at a time, and no more than 5,000 target leads across them. Large regions want a queue of jobs, not one enormous one.
5. Export and deduplicate. Overlapping areas produce the same business twice. Deduplicate on name plus address before anything downstream sees it.
6. Then filter for what you actually want. The area gives you every business in it. The segment you want is usually narrower, whether that is the ones with no website, the ones whose site is outdated, or the ones with few reviews.

For what belongs in the list once you have it, and how to tell a usable row from a dead one, see building a lead list from Google Maps.

Counting rather than contacting

Not everyone asking this question wants to sell to the list. Sometimes the question is how many competitors operate in an area, how saturated a category is, or where a category is underserved.

That is a different use of the same export, and the analysis is different enough to be worth its own treatment. We covered it in local market research with Google Maps data.

FAQ

How do I get a list of all businesses in my area? Pick a source that records geography, then decide how the area is defined. Google Maps listings are the most current option because businesses maintain them, and a Maps export gives you a row per listing with name, address, phone, category, rating, and coordinates. The harder half is defining the area, since a real service area rarely matches a city boundary.

Can I pull businesses by ZIP or postal code? Not directly in BasedOnBusiness. Searches are scoped by country, state or province, and city, or by an area you draw on a map. Postal codes are administrative units that often split neighbourhoods, so the usual fix is to draw a polygon around the area those codes cover and filter afterwards with the coordinates in the export.

Can I search within a radius of an address? There is no radius input, but drawing a rough circle as a polygon reaches the same result and is usually more accurate. A radius crosses rivers, motorways, and mountains as though they are not there, while a drawn shape follows how far you would actually drive.

How large an area can one search cover? A drawn area is capped at roughly 250,000 square kilometres of bounding box, with no side longer than about 800 km and at most 1,000 points in the shape. Beyond that, use country, state, and city scoping instead, which is what those fields are for.

Is a Chamber of Commerce or government registry better than Maps data? They answer different questions. A registry is authoritative about legal existence and terrible about trading status, since dissolved entities linger and addresses are registered rather than operational. Maps listings are maintained by the business itself, so they reflect trading reality but skip anything that never made a listing.

How many businesses can I pull in one job? One job takes up to 10 queries. An account can have 2 open jobs at a time, and the targets across open jobs total no more than 5,000 leads. Large areas are best split into several jobs by sub-area or category rather than pushed into one.

Get started

At basedonb.com, scope a search by city or draw the area yourself, then export the result as CSV or Excel. A new account includes 50 one-time export credits with no card. Paid plans are billed on day one and carry a 7-day money-back guarantee on the value of unused credits.