Address Lookup and Verification APIs

Address Lookup or Geocoding API

You already have the address, but you need the corresponding location. This operation is called Geocoding.

For example, you need to know the geographical coordinates of your customers. You can use our address search API to display the corresponding addresses on a map, so you can plan a delivery route, or estimate the distance between locations.

How it works: you enter "176 East 3rd Street, London, KY 40741, United States of America" and the API returns the coordinates => "37.128221 -84.081854"

Geoapify’s Geocoding API accepts a whole address or its components such as postcode, city, street, or house number. You can set your own parameters such as limiting results to specific countries or a set radius, or by prioritizing certain locations.

Address Autocomplete

If your business has an input form to collect addresses, Autocomplete API provides suggestions for the part of the address that the user enters. This is helpful when customers are placing an order at an online store, for food delivery, or when registering for an event or requesting information in the mail.

At first glance, address autocomplete looks similar to geocoding. However, they have significantly different goals. Autocomplete aims to guess the full address from the part the user enters, and return a result as quickly as possible. Autocomplete assumes that the user will review its suggestions and choose the correct one. Geocoding on the other hand accepts the complete address as an input, and tries to find the best fit.

How it works: a user enters "35 Village Court" and gets:

• 35 Village Court, Bible Hill, NS B2N 2T0, Canada
• 35 Village Court, New York, NY 10314, United States of America
• 35 Village Court, Westfield, ME 04787, United States of America

They can then choose the correct one.

Geoapify offers an Address Autocomplete API and ready-to-use components based on it. Our API returns separate address components like house number, street, postcode (or zipcode), city, state, country, and latitude/longitude coordinates. You can create autocomplete inputs based on postcode, city, and country. You can also filter and prioritize your results by countries or boundaries.

Reverse Address Lookup or Reverse Geocoding API

Reverse Address lookup API, also called Reverse Geocoding, is the opposite of geocoding. Instead of entering an address to get its coordinates, you enter the coordinates to find the corresponding address.

This is useful when you need to identify a customer’s location by their latitude/longitude, or a user clicked on a map and you need to know where they clicked.

How it works: You enter the coordinates "34.433304, -119.667754" and the API returns the address "1875 Eucalyptus Hill Road, Santa Barbara, CA 93108, United States of America"

With Geoapify Reverse Geocoding you can get addresses to match geographical coordinates. You can also specify the address level you want to work with (state, city, postcode or street.) If the coordinates are outside a building, the API will return the nearest building address.

Address Validation and Verification

Address Validation and Address Verification let you know whether the provided address exists, and is a valid address.

This can save your business valuable time and money that might be lost due to using an incorrect address. For example, if the address is incorrect your delivery drivers might get lost looking for it. Being able to verify addresses also helps businesses avoid payment fraud scams, or errors in entered shipping addresses.

Did you know that as many as 3% of the most legitimate looking addresses are actually rerouting fraud? Address verification can help you spot and avoid this.

Geoapify Geocoding provides confidence coefficients for the address in general, at the street level (confirming if the street is valid and verified), and at the city level (confirming if the city is valid and verified.)

How it works: if you search for "2382 Mapler St, Seaford, NY 11783, USA", the API will tell you that the address is not verified because there is no such street address, although the city and zip code were found.

Address Standardization

There are many different ways to write an address. Different countries have different standards, and there are often different localized names. Even one street can be written in many ways, such as the full name or abbreviation.

Take the Italian Street “Via XX Settermbre” as an example. It can also be written as “via 20 Settembre” or “Via Venti Settembre”, and all of these spelling are correct.

If you work with international addresses, you’ll find that different countries have different address standards. Like this:

• Henri-Dunant-Straße 74, 45131 Essen, Germany
• 440 Barrows Lane, Birmingham, B26 1QL, United Kingdom
• Rua Teodoro da Silva 726, Vila Isabel, Rio de Janeiro - RJ, 20560-000, Brazil

Address Standardization makes sure you record addresses correctly, and helps you convert them into the correct format for different mail carriers. This cuts down on incomplete or invalid information, and also reduces duplicate data.

With Geoapify Geocoding you can standardize the address format. The API provides address components such as postcode, city, country, street and house number as separate fields, so you can format each address according to your needs.