Choosing activities and business categories
Activities are the "what" of a search. How to pick several at once, how our categories map to what Google calls a business, and how many you can combine on each plan.
The Activities field is where you say what kind of business you want. It is a multi-select: type a word, pick a match, and it becomes a chip. Add as many chips as you need and the search returns businesses matching any of them.
Categories come from the map, not from us
There are 4,000+ categories, and they are the ones the maps themselves use. That is deliberate — a category we invented would not match anything. It also means the vocabulary can feel oddly specific: "Fine dining restaurant", "Seafood restaurant" and "Fish & chips restaurant" are three separate categories, not one.
Primary type versus all types
Each business has one primary type and any number of secondary ones. The export writes them
into two columns: Main type holds the primary, and All types holds
every type on the listing, comma-separated, like
Accountant,Accounting firm,Consultant. A search matches on either, so
picking "Restaurant" will return a business whose primary category is "Fine dining
restaurant".
Go one level broader than feels right
If you search only the narrowest category you will miss businesses that describe themselves slightly differently. Start broad, look at the count, then use filters to cut it down rather than narrowing the category.
How many can I combine?
All 4,000+ categories are searchable on every plan. The only thing that varies is how many of them you may put into a single search:
| Plan | Categories in one search |
|---|---|
| Starter | 25 |
| Growth | 100 |
| Scale | Unlimited |
| Enterprise | Unlimited |
The limit applies per search, not per month, and that distinction is worth leaning on. If you need forty categories on Starter, run two searches of twenty-five and fifteen. It costs the same in credits, because a business exported twice inside 30 days is billed once — see how lead credits work. What you lose is a little time and a single tidy count, not money.
Twenty-five is a wide net in practice. The worked example below uses six.
Finding the right category name
The category box searches as you type and shows how many businesses sit in each one, in your chosen location. Use that number: if "Osteopath" shows 12 and "Physiotherapist" shows 840, you have learned something about the market before spending anything.
A worked example
You sell scheduling software to clinics. Rather than one chip for "Clinic", add: Dental clinic, Dentist, Orthodontist, Physiotherapist, Chiropractor, Medical clinic. Six chips, one search, one count, one export. That is the shape most good searches take.
Next: narrow the location, then run the search and read the results.
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