Dun & Bradstreet Scraper and D&B API: A Business Data Guide
TL;DR
A D&B web scraper and the official D&B API solve different problems. A scraper can extract permitted public page content; the licensed API can return product-entitled company data in structured form.
D&B Direct+ uses OAuth 2.0 client credentials. D&B says customers obtain the key and secret from a D&B representative; tokens expire after 24 hours.
Do not invent a company-search endpoint or assume a public API is free. The exact Direct+ product, fields, quotas, and commercial terms depend on the customer’s agreement and entitlement.
Use public registries for the jurisdictions and fields they cover. SEC EDGAR provides US public-company filing data; it is not a substitute for D&B’s broader commercial business data.
Dun & Bradstreet Scraping vs D&B API: Key Differences
“D&B scraper” can refer to a script that reads public pages, an unofficial third-party data extractor, or an authorized integration with Dun & Bradstreet’s API. Those routes have different coverage, permissions, and engineering risk:
Approach
Data scope
Structure and matching
Access and cost
Appropriate use
Scrape a public D&B page
Only the content visible on permitted pages
HTML parsing that you maintain; may not expose all company attributes
Review the applicable terms, robots instructions, and data rights; no assumption of database access
A narrow, permitted page-level task
D&B Direct+ API
Data products your organization is entitled to use
Structured response for documented products and matching workflows
Requires customer credentials and commercial entitlement; check the contract for pricing and limits
Company identity, enrichment, supplier, or risk workflows covered by your agreement
Public company registry API
Official filings and registry fields for a specific jurisdiction
Structured official records, often with local identifiers
Authentication, rate limits, and reuse terms vary by registry
Jurisdiction-specific research and verification
Crawl company websites
Public page content from companies’ own sites
You define extraction and normalization; no authoritative business identity match
Access and use depend on each target site’s rules
Collecting public product, documentation, or company-page content when permitted
A successful page fetch does not mean you have reproduced D&B’s commercial dataset. Web pages may omit licensed fields, reflect a different update schedule, or represent a local office rather than a global corporate entity. Nstdata Crawl is relevant only to permitted website-content collection, not D&B API records.
What Is Dun & Bradstreet and What Business Data Does It Provide?
Dun & Bradstreet is a commercial business-data provider. Depending on the product and customer entitlement, D&B data may support company identification, business profiles, sales and marketing enrichment, supplier workflows, and risk-related use cases. The exact fields and allowed uses are not universal: check the product documentation and the agreement for your account.
Understanding D-U-N-S Numbers
A D-U-N-S Number is a D&B identifier used to identify a business location in D&B’s system. It is not a tax number or a government registration number. A parent company, subsidiary, and branch may be represented as related but distinct entities. Review the D&B D-U-N-S reference for the identifier’s current definition and use.
For entity resolution, do not match on name alone. Keep the input name, country, address, source, and match outcome. Where the business process allows it, compare multiple attributes and route ambiguous matches to a human reviewer.
Common D&B Business Data Fields
A D&B product may expose company identity, address, industry classification, corporate linkage, financial or risk-related attributes, and other company profile details. Which fields are returned depends on the product code, view, market, and contractual entitlement. Do not hard-code assumptions from an example response into a schema used by every customer.
What Is the D&B API and How Does It Work?
D&B’s API products provide programmatic access to particular business data products. The D&B documentation catalog lists product features such as company search, matching, company details, and supplier data, but the available operations depend on which API product and entitlements an organization has. The Direct+ authentication documentation describes a token flow; it does not make every company-search endpoint publicly available.
A normal integration has four stages:
The organization obtains credentials and confirms product access with D&B.
The application exchanges its key and secret for an access token.
The application calls a specific resource documented for its product and market.
The application stores the returned fields with source, timestamp, and entitlement context.
D&B API Authentication and Access Requirements
D&B Direct+ uses the OAuth 2.0 client-credentials flow. D&B says the token endpoint is https://plus.dnb.com/v1/token, and tokens expire after 24 hours. Its documentation instructs customers to contact a D&B representative for the key and secret and to protect both credentials and access tokens like passwords. See the D&B Direct+ authentication guide.
Do not copy sample credential values from a documentation page into code. Store your account credentials in a secret manager or environment variables. Obtain the correct product endpoint, request parameters, and response schema from the documentation available to your account.
Searching and Matching Business Entities
Company matching is inherently ambiguous. “Acme Ltd” may refer to multiple legal entities, and a brand name may differ from the registered company name. Send the strongest fields that your entitled endpoint accepts—typically a name and location, and, where appropriate, a local registration identifier. The exact parameter names depend on the product API.
Define a match policy before enriching records:
High confidence: key identity fields agree with the returned entity.
Needs review: name matches but country, address, or legal suffix differs.
No match: the API returns no suitable candidate or the required fields conflict.
Store the match decision and the input values so the result can be audited later.
Retrieving Company Profiles and Business Attributes
A company-profile request should be built from the endpoint and product view documented for your account. Do not assume that a “standard” view contains every data point your business process needs. Check whether optional data is separately entitled and whether a successful transaction has a usage charge under your agreement.
Record field-level provenance where it matters: provider, product, retrieval time, source identifier, and any data freshness field returned by the response. Missing values should stay missing rather than being inferred from a scraped page.
Can You Scrape Dun & Bradstreet Website Data?
A public profile page may display some company information, but scraping that page is not equivalent to access to D&B’s full commercial data. The page can be incomplete, personalized, dynamically rendered, or subject to terms that restrict automated collection or reuse.
Technical Challenges of Website-Based Collection
A page parser can break when markup changes. It can also confuse a parent company with a branch, miss fields hidden behind interaction, or collect duplicate profiles for the same entity. If the page is dynamic, browser rendering may be required—but rendering only changes how the page is loaded; it does not expand your rights to use the content.
A crawler is suited to collecting permitted page content at scale within a defined scope. It is not an entity-matching service and cannot return fields absent from the pages it visits.
Website Terms, Licensing, and Data Rights
Before collecting or reusing business data, review the terms that apply to the site, your D&B contract, and the laws and privacy requirements relevant to your use. In particular, verify whether storage, enrichment, redistribution, and retention are permitted. Ask D&B or your legal/compliance team if the contract is unclear.
Do not use automation to bypass login, paywall, CAPTCHA, or technical access restrictions. If your organization has licensed API access, use the documented API rather than attempting to reconstruct the dataset from web pages.
D&B API Tutorial: A Practical Business Data Workflow
The example below shows the verified Direct+ token exchange and a deliberately generic resource request. It does not invent a company-search path. Set DNB_RESOURCE_URL and the request parameters from the endpoint documentation for the product your organization is authorized to use.
Step 1: Prepare Company Search Inputs
Normalize the input record before making a call. A useful internal structure might contain:
The call to call_entitled_resource() should pass parameter names and values from the endpoint reference you have access to. Some D&B products may use a different request method or payload; adapt the example to that product’s documented contract. Do not log the token or secrets.
Step 3: Parse and Normalize Business Data
Map the response into your own stable schema instead of passing a provider response through every downstream service. Because field paths vary by product, make the mapping explicit:
The values passed to this function should be extracted using the actual JSON paths in your response. The normalized object above is a suggested internal shape, not a promise about D&B’s raw field names.
Step 4: Match, Deduplicate, and Store Company Records
Use the D-U-N-S Number or another authorized stable provider identifier as a candidate key, while retaining the original source record ID. Avoid merging entities solely because their normalized names match. Keep a match confidence and evidence fields, and make updates idempotent so rerunning a batch does not create duplicate company rows.
D&B API Pricing and Total Cost of Ownership
There is no single public price that can be applied to every D&B API product and customer. Access, product entitlements, usage charges, quotas, and contract terms vary. Some D&B API documentation describes metered requests and entitlement requirements for particular products, but those terms should not be generalized across Direct+, Direct 2.0, or other regions. Ask D&B for the current quote and the definition of a billable transaction for your product.
A useful cost model is:
monthly total = platform or contract fees + billable API calls + data storage + integration and monitoring work
For a scraper, include maintenance for page changes, allowed request rates, data-quality review, and licensing checks. Compare the total cost of a compliant workflow, not just the cost of the first HTTP request.
D&B API Alternatives for Business Data Collection
Public data sources can be a good fit when you need official records from a particular jurisdiction. They do not necessarily contain the same corporate hierarchy, identity matching, risk indicators, or global coverage as a commercial data provider.
Public Company Registries vs Commercial Data APIs
SEC EDGAR: the SEC publishes JSON APIs for company submissions and extracted XBRL data. It is a source for US public-company filings and reported facts, not a global private-company database. The SEC API documentation says the public data APIs do not require API keys and are updated as filings are disseminated.
Companies House: the UK registry provides a REST API for company information it records. Access requires API credentials, and its data scope reflects the UK register. See the Companies House API getting-started guide.
Other national registries: each has its own entity identifiers, fields, availability, update cadence, rate limits, and reuse terms. Check the relevant government source directly.
Commercial business-data APIs: choose a licensed provider when you need cross-border company information or attributes not present in public registries. Compare coverage and contract rights before integrating.
When Web Crawling APIs Are Useful
A crawling API can collect permitted public content from company websites—for example, a product page, documentation page, or corporate announcement—and return normalized page content. It cannot replace D&B’s proprietary company records, infer a reliable D-U-N-S match from arbitrary HTML, or grant access to restricted pages.
Supplier due diligence: identify the supplier entity and retrieve only the risk or linkage fields your contract covers.
CRM enrichment: match a company record, store provenance, and review ambiguous matches before writing changes back.
Market research: combine authorized commercial data with public filings and clearly label the source and coverage of each field.
Public company research: use SEC filing data for filings and reported facts; use a licensed provider when the task requires additional company attributes.
Company website monitoring: crawl permitted public pages for changes in product or policy content, while keeping that data separate from authoritative company identity records.
How to Build a Compliant Business Data Pipeline
A production pipeline should carry permission and provenance alongside the data:
Confirm the license, product entitlement, and allowed purpose.
Acquire the data through an approved API or public registry.
Normalize identifiers and country-specific fields.
Match entities using multiple attributes and retain the confidence or review status.
Store provider, source record, retrieval time, and data freshness.
Apply retention, correction, and deletion rules from the applicable agreement.
Monitor quotas, cost, match rates, missing fields, and API errors.
This design helps prevent an apparently convenient web scrape from becoming an untraceable source of company records.
Final Verdict: D&B API, Web Scraping, or Alternative Data Sources?
Use D&B’s API when the required fields, markets, and usage rights are included in your organization’s D&B agreement. Use public registries for jurisdiction-specific official records. Use a crawler for permitted public website content, not to reproduce a licensed business database. Before choosing, run a small proof of concept that measures match quality, field coverage, update needs, and full operating cost.
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For a separate task involving permitted public company websites, evaluate Nstdata Crawl. D&B API records and usage rights remain governed by your D&B product entitlement.
Yes. D&B offers API products including Direct+ and other product-specific APIs. The operations and fields depend on the product and entitlement available to your organization.
Q: Is the D&B API free?
Do not assume it is free. Access and usage terms depend on the API product, customer agreement, and entitlement. Ask D&B for the current pricing and billable-use rules for your account.
Q: Can you scrape D&B?
A script can technically parse a page that is publicly accessible, but page scraping does not provide the full licensed D&B dataset. Check the applicable terms and do not bypass login, paywalls, or other access restrictions.
Q: What is a D-U-N-S Number?
It is a D&B business identifier associated with a business location in D&B’s system. It is not a tax number or a government registration number.
Q: How do I get company data from D&B?
Confirm the product and fields you need, obtain authorized credentials and entitlements from D&B, use the product’s documented authentication and endpoint, then normalize and store the data with source and retrieval metadata.
Q: What are alternatives to the D&B API?
For public records, use the official company registry for the relevant jurisdiction, such as SEC EDGAR for US public-company filings or Companies House for UK company information. For commercial enrichment, compare licensed providers based on coverage, fields, price, and usage rights.
Ivy Lin
Oct. 19th 2026
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