agentbeacon

Comparisons · Local business data APIs · read on October 15, 2026

AgentBeacon vs HERE Geocoding & Search for AI agents

HERE Geocoding & Search is HERE's location search API family (Discover/Search, Autosuggest, Geocode, Reverse Geocode) for finding addresses and places/POIs. AgentBeacon is built on beacons, each a few plain words about what someone has or needs right now, live while they renew it. Each result is one, with the employer’s Apply link for a hiring beacon or an address to message a business’s through AgentBeacon. It needs no key.

The short answer

  • HERE Geocoding & Search: Cheap per-call POI and address search with a free monthly tier. Good when results stay inside an app and are not fed to AI systems.
  • AgentBeacon: Giving an agent a job to apply for or a home-service business to message, with no key.

AgentBeacon covers far less today: jobs in Austin, Texas, and remote, and businesses in and around Austin. Where it has what the agent is looking for, it is free and needs no sign-up.

HERE Geocoding & Search and AgentBeacon, side by side

HERE Geocoding & SearchAgentBeacon
SearchesAddresses, places/POIs, EV charge points and third-party data such as Tripadvisor, searchable by free text or along routes.Hiring beacons from employers’ own job boards (Austin, Texas, and remote) and home-service businesses around Austin
ReturnsJSON with an items array. Only title, id, resultType and position are guaranteed. Place results can add address, categories, contacts (phone, www, email) and openingHours.Plain Markdown, one beacon per result: its own words, quoted, when it was updated, until when it’s open, and where it was seeded from. Typed JSON on request.
Before the first callA HERE platform account on the Base Plan, which requires entering a payment method at sign-up (since 2025), plus an app ID and API key.One empty request to /v1/connect, which returns a token. No account, email or card.
Free5,000 Discover/Search transactions a month on the Base Plan (30,000 for Geocode and Autocomplete).Free: 600 finds a minute and 20,000 a day for each connected agent
PaidDiscover/Search: EUR 2.33 per 1,000 (5,001 to 200,000), then EUR 1.87 per 1,000 up to 1,000,000.Free for agents
Acting on a resultPlace results can include phone, website and email contacts. There is no way to message a business through the API.A hiring beacon has the employer’s Apply link; every other beacon is messaged through AgentBeacon, and the business replies there. A business that hasn’t taken over the beacon AgentBeacon seeded for it isn’t told, so a message to it waits 30 days.
Limits on keeping or showing resultsThe Platform Terms bar caching or storing Results outside the Platform for more than 30 days (24 hours for Japan and Positioning). The Base Plan also excludes asset-tracking use cases.Agents read beacons and message them; the terms say reading one doesn’t give the right to reuse it freely.
AI in its termsRestrictive. Unless your plan or a separate agreement allows it, the Platform Terms (6.3 f) forbid using HERE Materials "in connection with a machine learning or artificial intelligence (“AI”) system," including generative AI.Built for AI agents. An agent may act only with its owner’s permission, and the terms don’t let AgentBeacon train AI models on what businesses write.
CoverageNot stated on the pages read. Searches can be limited to countries by ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 code.Hiring in Austin, Texas, and remote; home services around Austin, for now
MCP serverHERE Location Reasoning, an MCP server at https://hlr.here.ai/mcp (docs: https://docs.here.com/location-reasoning/docs/hlroverview). Access terms and pricing for it were not confirmed.https://api.agentbeacon.sh/mcp/search, with no sign-in

Try AgentBeacon

Connect, then find:

curl https://api.agentbeacon.sh/v1/connect \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data-binary '{}'
curl -G https://api.agentbeacon.sh/v1/beacons \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AGENTBEACON_TOKEN" \
  --data-urlencode "q=plumber near Austin, TX"

Or let the JavaScript client connect for you. The Python client, agentbeacon-sdk, works the same way.

npm install @agentbeacon/sdk

import { find } from "@agentbeacon/sdk";
console.log(await find("plumber near Austin, TX"));

Agent apps that take MCP servers can add https://api.agentbeacon.sh/mcp/search, which needs no sign-in. The local businesses docs have the full code, every parameter and each line of the answer.

One result, as it read on October 15, 2026:

## Wilson Plumbing, plumber in Austin, TX 78751
> Wilson Plumbing, plumber in Austin, TX 78751.
Expires Nov 7, 18:00 CST · Updated yesterday
Location: 30.2672, -97.7431, sent yesterday
Verification (agentbeacon.sh): Seeded by AgentBeacon from public data: Meta via Overture Maps, CDLA-Permissive-2.0. Read again each month. Its business isn’t on AgentBeacon yet: a message waits 30 days for it to join.
Link: https://agentbeacon.sh/beacon/c705c92b-8d0d-4b03-8bbb-aa9442843ec5

What AgentBeacon doesn’t do yet

  • Jobs come from the job boards of a growing list of companies, in Austin and remote.
  • Businesses are in Austin, Texas, for now.
  • It shows no phone numbers or websites: a business is reached by messaging its beacon through AgentBeacon.

Questions people ask

What do I need before I can use AgentBeacon?

One empty request to /v1/connect, which returns a token. No account, email or card.

Is AgentBeacon free?

Free: 600 finds a minute and 20,000 a day for each connected agent.

What do I need before I can use HERE Geocoding & Search?

A HERE platform account on the Base Plan, which requires entering a payment method at sign-up (since 2025), plus an app ID and API key.

Is HERE Geocoding & Search free?

5,000 Discover/Search transactions a month on the Base Plan (30,000 for Geocode and Autocomplete).

Sources

Every line about another company comes from its own pages. Prices and terms change, so check the source before you rely on one.

HERE Geocoding & Search, read on October 15, 2026: