Data sources & attribution

GTASearch business listings are built from public open-data published by municipalities across the Greater Toronto Area. Every listing describes a real, publicly registered business. We do not invent listings, and we do not publish ratings or reviews that people did not write.

• City of Toronto — Business Licences and Permits

  Covers Toronto

  Restaurants and food premises, auto repair, driving schools, pet shops and second-hand shops.

  Licence: Open Government Licence – Toronto · Dataset

• Toronto Public Health — BodySafe

  Covers Toronto

  Hair salons, barbers, nail salons, esthetics, tattoo and piercing studios. Business name, address and service type only — inspection results are never published here.

  Licence: Open Government Licence – Toronto · Dataset

• Toronto Public Health — ChildCareSafe

  Covers Toronto

  Licensed child care centres. Business name and address only — inspection results are never published here.

  Licence: Open Government Licence – Toronto · Dataset

• City of Mississauga — 2025 Business Directory

  Covers Mississauga

  Businesses across every category, classified by NAICS industry code.

  Licence: City of Mississauga Terms of Use · Dataset

• City of Brampton — Business Directory

  Covers Brampton

  Businesses across every category, classified by NAICS industry code.

  Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) · Dataset

• York Region — Business Directory (2024)

  Covers Markham, Vaughan, Richmond Hill, Newmarket, Aurora, Whitchurch-Stouffville, Georgina, East Gwillimbury and King

  Businesses across every category, classified by NAICS industry code.

  Licence: York Region Open Data Licence · Dataset

• Durham Region — Business Directory

  Covers Oshawa, Whitby, Ajax, Pickering, Clarington, Uxbridge, Scugog and Brock

  Businesses across every category, classified by NAICS industry code.

  Licence: Durham Region Open Data Licence · Dataset

Attribution

• Contains public sector information made available under The Regional Municipality of York's Open Data Licence.
• Contains public sector information made available under The Regional Municipality of Durham's Open Data Licence.

What we leave out on purpose

These feeds include sole proprietors who registered under their own name at their own home. We do not publish those: a listing whose name is a person's name is only shown when the record also shows signs of commercial premises, such as a website or a unit number in a plaza or office building. We also never import health-inspection results, infractions or fines, even though some of the source datasets contain them.

Why coverage differs between cities

The number of businesses we list for a city reflects what that municipality publishes — not how much commerce it has. Peel, York and Durham publish full business directories covering every industry, so our coverage there is broad. Toronto does not publish a business directory at all; what it releases is business licences and public health inspections. The City licenses restaurants, salons and garages, but it does not license doctors, dentists, lawyers or accountants — those are regulated by provincial colleges — so those professions are absent from Toronto's open data, and therefore from our Toronto listings.

This is why we never rank cities by how many businesses we hold. The counts shown beside each city are real, but they measure our source coverage, not the size of a local economy, and reading them as a league table would be misleading.

Corrections

Open data can be out of date — businesses close, move and change hands between publications. If a listing is wrong, or you are the owner and want it corrected or removed, contact us and we will fix it.

GTASearch is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by any of the municipalities listed above.