What is Business Search?

Business Search is an entity search API that returns ranked people and company records as JSON. Compare its 3 modes by speed, depth, cost and precision.

Business Search is in early access. Email [e-mail] to request access.

An entity search returns the thing you searched for, not documents about it. Describe a person or a company and Business Search returns the matching records as structured JSON, rather than a list of pages that mention them.

One request searches an index of more than 700 million people and companies, refreshed daily. Two entity types are available:

Company

Find companies by industry, headquarters country, size band, founding year and funding stage, with structured conditions or a plain-language sentence.

People

Find people by title, current company, location and follower count, with structured conditions or a plain-language sentence.

Search modes

Business Search supports a range of workflows, from looking up one company to discovering every candidate in a market, so it offers three modes that trade speed, depth, cost and precision against each other. The mode property selects one:

• Ludicrous runs structured conditions you write with Business Search query syntax, exactly as written. It is the fastest mode and returns up to 100 records per page.
• Instant takes a plain-language sentence, turns it into one structured query and returns its matches. It also returns up to 100 records per page, at the same rate as Ludicrous.
• Smart takes the same kind of sentence, then ranks the candidates by how well each record answers the request. It is the most precise mode, the slowest and the most expensive, and returns 10 records per page.

In every mode, documents come back in ranked order.

Ludicrous

Ludicrous is a lexical, structured search: you name the fields and conditions yourself, text conditions match words with BM25, and no model interprets the request or reorders the results.

Sample request

cURL

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": "software" } },
        { "equals": { "headquarters_country_code": "US" } },
        { "range": { "employees_in_linkedin": { ">=": 50, "<=": 500 } } }
      ]
    },
    "limit": 3,
    "view": "summary"
  }'

Sample response

{
  "req_id": "r3417705745d9445bab3114d77d75f16d",
  "meta": { "coverage_percent": 100, "matched": 8, "offset": 0, "limit": 3 },
  "documents": [
    {
      "bright_id": "abc7d8b3719192a4f04197ab57cf352bdbda5abac31dfe1467cc61521d61741c",
      "data": {
        "name": "Braintrust",
        "slogan": "Active observability for agents in production.",
        "industry": "Software Development",
        "headquarters_location": "San Francisco",
        "headquarters_country_code": "US",
        "company_size_from": 51,
        "company_size_to": 200,
        "employees_in_linkedin": 169,
        "linkedin_followers": 15953,
        "website": "https://braintrust.dev/",
        "domain": "braintrust.dev"
      }
    }
  ]
}

meta.matched counts the records the search reached, not every company that satisfies the conditions. See How to paginate Business Search results.

Instant

Instant turns the sentence into one structured query and returns its matches in text-match order.

Sample request

cURL

curl --request POST "https://api.brightdata.com/search/company" \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $BRIGHTDATA_API_KEY" \
  --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --data '{
    "mode": "instant",
    "query": "Developer infrastructure companies building tools for AI engineering teams",
    "limit": 3,
    "view": "summary"
  }'

Sample response

{
  "req_id": "re5aefd1a0b9c4b9d813af52ce935c26d",
  "meta": { "coverage_percent": 100, "matched": 1314, "offset": 0, "limit": 3 },
  "documents": [
    {
      "bright_id": "cff2fcd9da9a150b16cbc855777265c8de34f3a360986903f23f7f4e73fcf497",
      "data": {
        "name": "Flamerix AI",
        "slogan": "Infrastructure for controlled AI-driven software development.",
        "industry": "IT Services and IT Consulting",
        "headquarters_location": "Tbilisi",
        "headquarters_country_code": "GE",
        "company_size_from": 2,
        "company_size_to": 10,
        "employees_in_linkedin": 1,
        "linkedin_followers": 3,
        "website": "https://flamerix.ai/",
        "domain": "flamerix.ai"
      }
    }
  ]
}

Smart

Smart runs the same interpretation as Instant, then reads each candidate and reorders them by how well the record answers the request, so the first result changes.

Sample request

cURL

curl --request POST "https://api.brightdata.com/search/company" \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $BRIGHTDATA_API_KEY" \
  --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --data '{
    "mode": "smart",
    "query": "Developer infrastructure companies building tools for AI engineering teams",
    "limit": 3,
    "view": "summary"
  }'

Sample response

{
  "req_id": "r8f4b4e27936b40aaaa342a894f4ac460",
  "meta": { "coverage_percent": 100, "matched": 1294, "offset": 0, "limit": 3 },
  "documents": [
    {
      "bright_id": "c455ef8769b2656cfe67d4a534edb30ff0f55d0241ea95d04e32835684cf3bf8",
      "data": {
        "name": "Skyflo",
        "slogan": "AI engineering harness for coding agents, tools, context, and long-running work.",
        "industry": "Software Development",
        "headquarters_location": "Pune, Maharashtra",
        "headquarters_country_code": "IN",
        "company_size_from": 2,
        "company_size_to": 10,
        "employees_in_linkedin": 2,
        "linkedin_followers": 214,
        "website": "https://skyflo.ai/",
        "domain": "skyflo.ai"
      }
    }
  ]
}

If Smart’s ranking step fails, the request returns the results Instant would have returned rather than an error, and it is still billed as Smart.

Compare the modes

Mode	Query input	Results per search (included / maximum)	Typical response time	When to use
ludicrous	Structured conditions	100 / 1,000	~50ms	Your application already knows which fields to filter on
instant	Plain-language sentence	100 / 1,000	~1 second	Natural language at interactive speed; the default for interactive use
smart	Plain-language sentence	10 / 100	~2 to 3 seconds	Result quality matters more than latency, or a wrong first result is costly

What is the rate limit?

Business Search allows 60 requests per minute by default, counted per account, per category and per mode. Company and people searches therefore have separate budgets, as do Ludicrous, Instant and Smart within each category. A request over the limit returns HTTP 429 with a Retry-After header and is neither searched nor billed. See Business Search error codes for the retry rule.

Where do you go next?

Quickstart

Send your first company search and read the response.

Pricing

Per-1,000-search rates by mode and what counts as billable.

Frequently asked questions

Is Business Search an enrichment product?

No. Business Search discovers and retrieves records. To add detail to records you already have, use Scraper API or your own stack.

How fresh is the Business Search index?

The index refreshes daily. A record added or changed at the source appears in Business Search results after the next daily refresh.