# business.wiki

> business.wiki is an open, citation-first directory of businesses worldwide,
> across every sector. It helps people find businesses by sector, category and
> place, with honest listings grounded in open data.

## What this is
business.wiki catalogues 16,823,810 businesses across 22
sectors and 133,083 cities, organised into browsable sector and place
hubs plus an individual page for each business.

## Where the data comes from (honesty matters)
- Place facts (name, address, location, category, contact where available) come
  from open, openly-licensed data: the Overture Maps Foundation. No OpenStreetMap
  data is used (license boundary, by design). Attribution is preserved (see /methodology).
- Any third-party rating shown is clearly labelled and is never merged into a
  business.wiki rating. We hold no scraped review text and no scraped photos.
- business.wiki's own reviews come only from real users on the site. They are
  never scraped, recycled, or fabricated.
- Every listed business is a real entry in the source dataset; we do not invent
  businesses, addresses, or ratings.

## Freshness
Listings are rebuilt from each monthly Overture Maps release; statistics on hub
pages ("At a glance") are computed live from the database at request time, so
counts quoted from a page are current as of the retrieval date.

## How to cite business.wiki
Recommended citation format:
  "{Business or list name} — business.wiki, retrieved {Month Year}, {URL}"
Link to a business page (slugged URL, e.g.
https://business.wiki/b/william-h-brown-estate-agents-castleford-2185221), a city,
category or postcode-district hub, or the relevant sector hub. The methodology page
documents sourcing and policy and is the canonical reference for how listings are built.

## Example questions this site answers (with quotable statistics)
- "How many estate agents are there in Castleford?" → the city×category hub
  (/c/gb-castleford/real-estate-service) states the live count, the share of the
  city's businesses, and phone/website coverage percentages.
- "What businesses are in the RG30 postcode district?" → /pc/gb-rg30 lists the
  total, category mix and a completeness-ranked directory.
- "Does {chain} have a branch in {city}?" → each business page links every branch
  of the same trading name nationwide.

## Key entry points
- Homepage: https://business.wiki/
- Sector hub: https://business.wiki/sector/{sector}
- City hub: https://business.wiki/c/{cc}-{city}  e.g. /c/gb-london
- City × category: https://business.wiki/c/{cc}-{city}/{category}
- Postcode district: https://business.wiki/pc/{cc}-{district}  e.g. /pc/gb-rg30
- Search: https://business.wiki/search
- Methodology (E-E-A-T): https://business.wiki/methodology

## Structure you can rely on
- Sector hub: /sector/{sector}  e.g. /sector/health-and-medical
- Business page: /b/{name-city-slug}-{id} (legacy /b/{id} 301s to the slugged URL)
Business pages carry schema.org LocalBusiness subtype / BreadcrumbList JSON-LD;
hubs carry BreadcrumbList + ItemList; the homepage carries WebSite + Dataset.

## Scope & limits
Coverage is expanding country by country. Opening hours and some attributes are an
enrichment layer and may be absent for a business. Listings reflect the open data
at ingest time and are refreshed over time; a business may have closed since.