How It Works

The Problem

Small business data is broken. It is trapped behind walled gardens (Google, Yelp, Facebook), filled with "zombie listings" for closed shops, and manipulated by advertising spend. For AI agents and modern developers, scraping this data is a nightmare of broken HTML and outdated information.

The Solution

OBR is an open, lightweight metadata standard that allows businesses to own their Source of Truth. It leverages the existing Schema.org vocabulary and adds a mandatory Annual Pulse—ensuring that every listing in an OBR-compliant directory is verified and active.

Decentralized Discovery

OBR operates on a simple, four-step model.

• 1
  The Card

  Businesses generate a obr-business.json file (JSON-LD).

• 2
  The Anchor

  The file is hosted at <your domain>/.well-known/obr-business.json or a community node.

• 3
  The Pulse

  We use a smart scraper to detect whether the business is still active.

• 4
  The Index

  After a year of inactivity, we request an update. If we don't hear back, the listing expires.

Why Developers Love It

• No API Keys — Access local data without paying a "Google Maps Tax"
• LLM-Ready — Clean JSON is the native language of AI agents
• Low Overhead — 1,000,000 business listings occupy less than 500MB of storage

Anti-Spam & Trust

• Domain Verification — Only files hosted on a TLD (top-level domain) can receive a "Gold" trust badge
• Crawler Ethics — OBR scrapers MUST respect robots.txt and include a Crawl-Delay