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# Business verification: check a company is real and open

Business Verify answers one question about a company: is it real, currently open and reachable at the contact details you hold. Use it when you are onboarding a merchant, screening a vendor or cleaning a list of business records.

## What it tells you

- A verdict on whether the business was matched and verified, plus a verification score from 0 to 100.
- The listing it matched: business name, street address, category, operational status, rating and review count.
- The individual checks behind the score, and the ones that failed, so you can see why a score came in below 100.
- For a phone number you send: whether it is valid, the line type behind it (for example mobile), whether it matches the number on the listing and whether it carries a Do Not Call flag.

## What you need to provide

- Required: the business name and the city it operates in.
- Optional: a two-letter country code, which defaults to US.
- Optional: a phone number, validated and compared against the listing.
- Optional: an email (its domain is checked against the business website) and a website to compare against the listing.

## What it costs

30 credits per lookup. This one is success-based: you are charged 0 credits when the business is not found. Live per-product costs are shown on the Billing page in your dashboard.

## How to run it

- In the dashboard: Business Verify
- From your code: POST /v1/business-verify, then see the Developer Hub at app.1lookup.io/developer-hub.

## Good to know

- This is a deep fetch, so expect seconds rather than milliseconds. It blends live business-listing data with phone and email cross-checks rather than reading one record.
- Repeat lookups on the same business inside the 7-day cache window are served from cache.
- Results are point-in-time. A business can close, move or change its phone number after the check, so re-run before relying on an old verdict.
- The Do Not Call flag and the other checks are data points, not a compliance decision. What you do with them, and which rules apply to your program, is between you and your own legal counsel.