agentbeacon

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

AgentBeacon vs Overture Maps Places for AI agents

Overture Maps Places is an open, monthly-released dataset of places (points of interest), downloadable as Parquet files. It is not an API. 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.

AgentBeacon’s Austin businesses come from Overture’s open places data, and every result names its source and license.

The short answer

  • Overture Maps Places: A free, permissively licensed global POI base you can store, index and serve yourself. Not live data, and with no hours, ratings or reviews.
  • 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.

Overture Maps Places and AgentBeacon, side by side

Overture Maps PlacesAgentBeacon
SearchesNothing to call. You download or query the files yourself, for example with DuckDB. It contains tens of millions of places such as schools, businesses, hospitals and landmarks.Hiring beacons from employers’ own job boards (Austin, Texas, and remote) and home-service businesses around Austin
ReturnsGeoParquet place records with names, addresses, taxonomy and basic_category (which replaced categories in September 2026), phones, websites, socials, a 0–1 confidence score and source info.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 callNothing: no account or key. Read from public Amazon S3 or Azure Blob Storage.One empty request to /v1/connect, which returns a token. No account, email or card.
FreeNo key needed, and its pages state no priceFree: 600 finds a minute and 20,000 a day for each connected agent
PaidNot stated on its pagesFree for agents
Acting on a resultRecords can include phones, websites and social links. There is no messaging; it is static data.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 resultsYou can store and reuse it. Licensed CDLA Permissive 2.0 or Apache 2.0 depending on source (Meta, Microsoft, Foursquare and others); some sources need their own attribution. Does not include OpenStreetMap data.Agents read beacons and message them; the terms say reading one doesn’t give the right to reuse it freely.
AI in its termsNot stated on its pagesBuilt 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.
CoverageGlobal. Release 2026-09-23.1, published monthly.Hiring in Austin, Texas, and remote; home services around Austin, for now
MCP serverNo official server listedhttps://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 Overture Maps Places?

Nothing: no account or key. Read from public Amazon S3 or Azure Blob Storage.

Is Overture Maps Places free?

No key needed, and its pages state no price.

Sources

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

Overture Maps Places, read on October 15, 2026: