Business Search API

Find the right companies and people for your market, sales, or recruiting workflows, from a few top matches to hundreds of relevant results. Search deeper without paying more for every result.

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Search 700M+ people and companies
Retrieve up to 1,000 records per request
Entire index refreshed within 30 days
From $2 per 1,000 searches

Request

Response

People & Company
Search - Recall@1 % · higher is better

based on Exa's Search Benchmarks

Bright Data64.8%

Exa61.8%

Search broadly to find precisely

Whether you retrieve enough relevant options to apply your own rules or let us rank the best results for you, every mode searches the same business index and can return full people and company records.

Describe the people or companies you need and retrieve a large candidate set at interactive speed.

Natural-language queries
Automatic query interpretation
Up to 1,000 results
~1s latency

Ludicrous: structured, deterministic retrieval

curl --request POST "https://api.brightdata.com/search/company" \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $BRIGHTDATA_API_KEY" \
  --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --data '{
    "mode": "ludicrous",
    "query": {
      "and": [
        { "text": { "industry": "artificial intelligence" } },
        { "equals": { "headquarters_country_code": "US" } }
      ]
    },
    "limit": 100,
    "view": {
      "fields": ["name", "website", "industry", "headquarters_country_code"]
    }
  }'

Instant: natural-language candidate generation

curl --request POST "https://api.brightdata.com/search/company" \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $BRIGHTDATA_API_KEY" \
  --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --data '{
    "mode": "instant",
    "query": "US software companies with 50 to 500 employees",
    "offset": 0,
    "limit": 20,
    "view": "summary"
  }'

Smart: managed precision

curl --request POST "https://api.brightdata.com/search/people" \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $BRIGHTDATA_API_KEY" \
  --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --data '{
    "mode": "smart",
    "query": "Product managers in the United States with cybersecurity experience",
    "offset": 0,
    "limit": 10,
    "view": "summary"
  }'

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The Bright Data advantage

Relevance on your terms

Retrieve a larger set of matching entities and apply your own business logic, or use Smart when managed ranking is the better fit.

Continuously refreshed

The entire people and company index is refreshed within 30 days, giving applications and agents current business information for production workflows.

Economics built for iteration

Search, refine, and repeat without making every additional result prohibitively expensive. Retrieve a broad candidate set, then enrich only the records that matter.

Ready for integration

Use stable entity IDs, compact or full views, selected fields, pagination, and consistent response shapes across all three modes.

Designed to drop into your stack

One response shapeSwitch modes without rebuilding your integration.
Stable entity IDsStore bright_id across requests and downstream systems.
Control the responseChoose id_only, summary, full, or specific fields.
Paginated retrievalSet offset and limit for deeper result sets.
Reliable troubleshootingEvery request returns a req_id.
Enterprise-readySOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR and CCPA support.

Pricing

Mode	Price	Included	Maximum per search
Ludicrous	$2 per 1,000 searches	Up to 100 results	1,000
Instant	$2 per 1,000 searches	Up to 100 results	1,000
Smart	$3 per 1,000 searches	10 ranked results	100

Each additional block of included results is billed as another search.

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Frequently asked questions

What is Business Search?

Business Search is an entity search API for discovering people and companies. It accepts natural-language or structured criteria and returns matching business records in a structured format.

How is it different from other entity search APIs?

Most entity search products optimize primarily for either a small set of highly ranked results or broad candidate retrieval. Business Search supports both: economical candidate generation with Ludicrous and Instant, and managed precision with Smart.

When should I use each mode?

Use Ludicrous when your application already knows the fields and conditions. Use Instant for fast natural-language candidate generation. Use Smart when the quality and ordering of the first results matter more than latency.

Does it support broad and targeted searches?

Yes. Ludicrous and Instant can retrieve candidate sets of up to 1,000 records, while Smart is designed for smaller, precision-ranked result sets. Business Search supports broad discovery but does not claim exhaustive coverage of every entity in a market.

Is Business Search a dataset?

No. Datasets are designed for persistent ownership and analysis of a predefined universe. Business Search is designed for ad hoc, changing, and relevance-led entity discovery.

Can I enrich the returned records?

Yes. Results can be passed to other Bright Data products or your existing enrichment and downstream workflow.

Where does the data come from?

Business Search runs against a large, continuously refreshed index of publicly available business information.

Put people and company search inside your product

Generate large candidate sets, retrieve precise matches, and choose the right search mode for every request.

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