Consumer trust & business verification · BBB · September 6, 2026
Better Business Bureau business profiles — letter rating, accreditation status, category, entity type, location, years in business and public contact details — queryable over one REST API. Filter by rating, accreditation, category, state or entity type; sort by rating or years in business. Read the coverage note before treating any rating share as a verdict on business quality — rating coverage tracks the paid accreditation relationship, not a neutral sample.
224,388
business profiles — one record per business, refreshed on a standing crawl schedule.
Snapshot September 6, 2026. The index covers US and Canadian profiles. There is no crawl-time filter on this endpoint, so no corpus-wide freshness window is published — each record carries its own crawled_at.
92.2%
of rated profiles hold an A+, the top grade. Letter ratings are compressed at the top by construction — the next grade down, A, accounts for barely two percent, and the whole B and C range together is smaller than the F band.
100%
of accredited businesses carry a letter rating — every single one. Among non-accredited businesses it is 65.7%. Rating coverage is a function of the paid relationship, which is why every share on this page names its denominator.
3.89%
is the F rate among non-accredited businesses, against 0.01% among accredited ones — a 287x gap. Accreditation and a clean grade move together; this data cannot say which direction the causation runs.
84.2%
of profiles carry an entity type, and the trades dominate the categories: roofing, general contracting, HVAC and plumbing are the four largest. This is a home-services-heavy footprint, not a cross-section of American business.
About nine in ten rated BBB profiles hold an A+, which reads like a rating scale that has stopped discriminating. The more useful fact is underneath it: rated profiles are not a neutral sample of the index. Every accredited business — accreditation is a paid membership — carries a letter rating, while only about three in five non-accredited businesses do. So the rated population is disproportionately made up of businesses paying the organisation that rates them, and their outcomes are visibly better: a far higher A+ share and an F rate two orders of magnitude lower. None of that tells you whether accreditation causes better conduct, whether better-run businesses are likelier to buy it, or whether rating and accreditation are simply entangled in BBB's own process. Report the denominators; don't report a verdict.
118,118 of 118,118 rated
69,841 of 106,270 rated
Of the 187,959 profiles carrying a letter rating, 173,335 (92.2%) hold the top grade. The scale nominally runs A+ through F across thirteen steps plus NR, but the middle is nearly empty: the entire B and C range holds fewer profiles than the F band alone. Treat a letter grade as a coarse flag — accredited or not, F or not — rather than a fine-grained quality score.
| Rating | Profiles | Share of rated |
|---|---|---|
| A+ | 173,335 | 92.2% |
| A | 5,148 | 2.7% |
| A- | 2,057 | 1.1% |
| B+ | 299 | 0.2% |
| B | 299 | 0.2% |
| B- | 1,698 | 0.9% |
| C+ | 717 | 0.4% |
| C | 292 | 0.2% |
| C- | 187 | 0.1% |
| D+ | 74 | 0% |
| D | 29 | 0% |
| D- | 719 | 0.4% |
| F | 2,731 | 1.5% |
| NR | 374 | 0.2% |
Accreditation is a paid BBB membership, and it splits the index almost in half. The two groups differ on all three measures below — whether a business is rated at all, how likely it is to hold an A+, and how likely it is to hold an F. The F gap is the widest: single-digit counts among accredited businesses against nearly two thousand among the rest. This is an association in BBB's own published data, not a causal claim.
| Group | Profiles | Rated | A+ (of rated) | F (of rated) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Accredited (paid) | 118,118 | 118,118 (100%) | 113,566 (96.1%) | 16 (0.01%) |
| Not accredited | 106,270 | 69,841 (65.7%) | 59,769 (85.6%) | 2,715 (3.89%) |
The trades dominate. Roofing, general contracting, HVAC and plumbing lead by a wide margin, which reflects both where BBB's consumer-complaint role matters most and which industries invest in accreditation. Note the ceiling on this table: the facet endpoint returns at most 50 category buckets, so the totals below cover the 50 largest categories only and are a lower bound, never the share of the index that carries a category.
| Category | Profiles | Share of top-50 total |
|---|---|---|
| Roofing Contractors | 9,021 | 10.2% |
| General Contractor | 6,223 | 7.1% |
| Heating and Air Conditioning | 4,466 | 5.1% |
| Plumber | 4,216 | 4.8% |
| Auto Repairs | 3,534 | 4% |
| Landscape Contractors | 2,985 | 3.4% |
| Construction Services | 2,850 | 3.2% |
| Painting Contractors | 2,759 | 3.1% |
| Electrician | 2,711 | 3.1% |
| Lawyers | 2,456 | 2.8% |
| Home Improvement | 2,202 | 2.5% |
| Air Conditioning Contractors | 1,923 | 2.2% |
The index covers the United States and Canada — Ontario sits inside the top ten alongside US states. The same 50-bucket ceiling applies as for categories, so this is the 50 largest states and provinces rather than every one, and there is no country filter on the endpoint to split the two nations cleanly.
| State / province | Profiles | Share of top-50 total |
|---|---|---|
| CA | 28,975 | 13.1% |
| TX | 16,295 | 7.3% |
| FL | 13,194 | 5.9% |
| OH | 10,642 | 4.8% |
| IL | 8,757 | 3.9% |
| NY | 8,192 | 3.7% |
| AZ | 7,183 | 3.2% |
| NC | 7,122 | 3.2% |
| MD | 6,530 | 2.9% |
| CO | 5,994 | 2.7% |
| PA | 5,707 | 2.6% |
| ON | 5,643 | 2.5% |
Entity type is one of the two fields whose facet comes back complete rather than truncated, so this breakdown is real coverage of the profiles that carry it. Corporations and LLCs together account for the overwhelming majority; the remaining nineteen structures are individually tiny but useful as filters.
| Entity type | Profiles | Share of typed profiles |
|---|---|---|
| Corporation | 82,533 | 43.7% |
| Limited Liability Company (LLC) | 74,105 | 39.2% |
| Sole Proprietorship | 26,050 | 13.8% |
| Private Limited Company by Shares (LTD) | 2,037 | 1.1% |
| Partnership | 1,515 | 0.8% |
| S Corporation | 794 | 0.4% |
| Non-profit Organization | 383 | 0.2% |
| Limited Liability Limited Partnership (LLLP) | 345 | 0.2% |
Search takes the filters below and combines them freely; facets return counts for a single field. Page with page and page_size. Reads hit the stored index and never trigger a live crawl.
Non-accredited businesses holding an F, worst first
# Non-accredited businesses holding an F, worst rating first
curl "https://api.crawlora.net/api/v1/datasets/bbb-businesses/search?accredited=0&rating=F&sort=rating_asc" \
-H "x-api-key: $CRAWLORA_API_KEY"Rating breakdown within a single category
# Rating breakdown within a single category
curl "https://api.crawlora.net/api/v1/datasets/bbb-businesses/facets?facet=rating&category=Roofing%20Contractors" \
-H "x-api-key: $CRAWLORA_API_KEY"92.2% of profiles that carry a letter rating hold an A+ (173,335 of 187,959), as of 2026-09-06. That figure needs its denominator, though: only 83.8% of the 224,388 profiles in the index carry a rating at all, and coverage is very uneven — every accredited business is rated, versus 65.7% of non-accredited ones. The rated population therefore skews toward businesses in a paid relationship with BBB, so the A+ share describes that population rather than businesses in general.
Strongly, in BBB's own published data. Accredited businesses are 96.1% A+ with an F rate of 0.01%; non-accredited businesses are 85.6% A+ with an F rate of 3.89% — roughly a 287x difference in F rate. What this dataset cannot tell you is why. Accreditation is a paid membership with its own conduct requirements, better-run businesses may simply be likelier to buy it, and rating and accreditation may be entangled in BBB's internal process. The association is solid; the causal direction is not established here.
224,388 business profiles as of 2026-09-06, covering the United States and Canada. California (28,975) is the largest single state, and Ontario appears inside the top ten alongside US states. The state facet returns at most 50 buckets, so per-state figures cover the 50 largest states and provinces; there is no country filter on the endpoint, so the US/Canada split is not directly queryable.
It is heavily weighted toward home-services trades. Roofing contractors, general contractors, HVAC and plumbing are the four largest categories, which reflects where BBB's consumer-complaint function is most used and which industries buy accreditation. It is not a cross-section of American business, and it should not be treated as a business registry. The category facet is also capped at 50 buckets, so category totals are a lower bound over the largest categories rather than full coverage.
Public profile fields read without login: business id, name, BBB profile URL, letter rating and rank, accreditation status and date, years in business, category and full category list, entity type, address, city, state, phone, website, alternate names, business management contacts, social media links, licensing notes, and links to the complaints and reviews pages. Filterable fields are rating, accredited, category, state and entity_type; sorts are relevance, rating, accreditation-first, name and years in business.
Yes. Search (full-text and faceted), a single business by id, and facet counts are all exposed over REST, and the same endpoints are available as MCP tools so an agent can call them directly. Reads hit the stored index and never trigger a live crawl; billing is pay-on-success. Companion BBB endpoints cover a business's complaints and reviews, plus BBB's Scam Tracker.
Filter 224,388 business profiles by rating, accreditation, category, state or entity type over one REST API — or call the same endpoints as MCP tools from an agent.