How we source contact data

Licence data gives us a business name and an address — never a phone number or an email. Everything reachable is found afterwards, from public sources, in this order:

Google Places

via Google Places · date

We look the licensed name and address up in Google Places. Where there is a confident match, it gives a phone number, a website and sometimes a social link. This is the widest single source.

The business’s own website

from business website · date

When we have a website, we fetch its contact and about pages and read the phone numbers, email addresses and social links the business itself published there. This is often the only way to get an email address — Places does not provide one.

Web search

found via web search · date

When Places has no match at all, a single web search per business is used to find an official website or social profile, which then feeds the step above.

Manual verification

verified by CityRadar · date

Occasionally a value is corrected or confirmed by hand — usually after somebody reported it. Those are labelled so you can tell them from automated finds.

We never generate or guess an address from a pattern (no first.last@domain construction), and we do not buy contact lists. If a value is on a profile, it was published somewhere public and we kept a record of where and when.

The small grey line at the top of the Contact card is the provenance, and it is per value. A phone from Places and an email from the business’s own site are two different claims, so they get two lines — for example via Google Places · Jul 3 2026 above from business website · Aug 8 2026. The date is when we fetched it, not when the business published it.

Two more things the card is careful about:

• Website means a domain the business owns. If the only link we found is an Instagram page or a booking platform, it appears under Social, never as “website”.
• Phone numbers say when they are not local. A number can be tagged as a central line (toll-free) or an out-of-province line, so you know before you dial that you may reach a head office rather than the new location.

Not every business has contact details, and we would rather show a gap than fill it with a guess. Measured on August 10, 2026, across the 714 businesses licensed in the preceding 90 days:

• about half had a phone number or an email address;
• about four in ten had a website;
• about half had at least one of phone, email or website.

The businesses that come back empty are mostly the ones with no web presence at all — home-based operators, sole traders, numbered companies. Newly licensed businesses also lag: a business licensed yesterday may not have set anything up online yet, which is why we re-check rather than looking once.

Phone numbers and email addresses are not in the page’s HTML. They are fetched separately once you have given us an email address, which means the indexed, cacheable version of every profile carries the business record and no contact values — scrapers and search engines get the public record, not the reachable list. You give an email once; it works across the site on that device, with no account and no card.

Every profile has a Report incorrect info form under the Contact card. It goes to a person; nothing on the page changes automatically. If you are the business and you want a detail removed rather than corrected, say so — or write to privacy@cityradar.io, which is also the route for anything covered by PIPEDA.

The values here are business contact details the business published publicly, and we keep the source and date for each one — which is the record you would want if a recipient ever asked where you got their number. That record is ours, not a substitute for your own obligations: if you send commercial email in Canada, CASL consent, identification and unsubscribe requirements are yours to meet. CityRadar does not send outreach on your behalf.

Sources we deliberately do not use: Yelp (its terms forbid storing the data), and paid corporate-registry lookups, whose licence terms do not allow republishing on a public page.