BBB Scraper — Better Business Bureau Ratings, Complaints, Leads

What it does

Better Business Bureau business profiles for the United States and Canada, read from BBB's own sitemaps and profile pages rather than only from its search box. Up to 76 fields per business: letter rating, accreditation, complaint and review counts, years in business, legal entity type, owners and officers, phone, website and coordinates.

{
  "business_name": "Example Plumbing LLC",
  "legal_name": "Example Plumbing LLC",
  "category_name": "Plumber",
  "category_id": "10113-000",
  "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",
  "principals": [{ "name": "Example Owner", "title": "Managing Member" }],
  "phone": ["(512) 555-0123"],
  "phone_e164": ["+15125550123"],
  "website": "https://example.com/",
  "city": "Austin",
  "state": "TX",
  "postal_code": "78748",
  "latitude": 30.3,
  "longitude": -97.76,
  "has_email": true,
  "accepts_quote_requests": true,
  "report_url": "https://www.bbb.org/us/tx/austin/profile/plumber/example-0825-1000000000"
}

Why this one

Use cases

• Build B2B lead lists of local service businesses by trade, city or state, with phone, website and address ready for a CRM.
• Screen a vendor before signing: letter rating, accreditation, complaints closed in three years and twelve months, years in business and entity type.
• Enrich an existing CRM by matching on name and city and appending rating, complaint counts and owners.
• Track a market on a schedule and watch ratings, accreditation and complaint counts move.
• Measure how far BBB's accredited members differ from the rest of a local market, using the sitemap and accredited sitemap separately.

Input

Every field has a default, and the defaults are deliberately small so a first run is cheap enough to inspect before you commit to a sweep. This table mirrors the Actor's own input schema field for field.

Output and fill rates

A field being in the schema is not the same as it having a value. The percentages below were counted on real runs; the sample sizes are in Measurements. Anything not listed here is not promised.

Every key is always present. A field that exists but is empty comes back as explicit null, so a parser never has to guess.

Datasets

Different record types go to different datasets, so the main table never carries columns that are blank on most rows.

Pricing

Pay per delivered result. Charges are applied as each row is produced rather than in a lump at the end, so an aborted run bills only for what it actually gave you.

Measurements

Each figure is shown with the method that produced it. A benchmark without a method is a marketing claim wearing a number's clothes.

What it will not do

Stated plainly so you can judge fit before spending anything.

• No review or complaint text, only counts and the average star rating. The text is written by identifiable consumers and is not republished.
• No email addresses. BBB obfuscates them to stop harvesting, and the output carries `has_email` instead.
• Canada is supported but unmeasured: every fill rate on this page comes from US samples.
• BBB caps a search or category query at 15 pages of 15, which is 225 businesses; sweeping A-Z and Z-A together reaches up to 450 per query.
• A city filter is strict only where BBB has a city category page. When a trade has none, the Actor falls back to BBB's search, which covers the surrounding metro area.
• BBB's robots.txt disallows every URL with a query string (`Disallow: /*?`) while explicitly allowing profile pages. Sitemap discovery and profile pages fall inside what it allows; the `search` mode and paginated category pages use query strings that it disallows.
• BBB's terms of use license the site for direct use and not for sale, republication or aggregation. Read them before building a product on the output.
• A single run is capped at 50,000 businesses.

Privacy

• Business profiles include the names and titles of owners and officers as BBB publishes them, on 71.7% of 120 sampled profiles. In the EU and UK that is personal data, and the buyer needs a lawful basis to process it.
• Consumer reviews and complaint texts are not collected, only their counts.
• Email addresses are not reconstructed from BBB's obfuscation.
• Removal requests: privacy@actorstack.dev

See also the data removal process.

Guides for this Actor

• Better Business Bureau APIBBB runs an API that requires approval and restricts complaint and review data to internal use. What the public site serves instead — a search box, category pages, profile pages and 575 sitemap files — and why the search box is the wrong sample.