Location Eligibility
Overview
Not every physical entity that appears in your data qualifies as a location in Apple Business. Before you submit data — whether in the Data Qualification Environment or in production — it is important to understand what Apple Maps recognizes as a distinct place eligible for capture.
Submitting entities that do not meet eligibility criteria can result in validation failures, rejected locations, and data qualification delays. Understanding the threshold in advance helps you make the right decisions about what to include in your submission and how to model your data.
What Qualifies as a Location
A location in Apple Business is a distinct, customer-facing physical place that a member of the public can independently identify, navigate to, and arrive at. It must have an official name that reflects its identity as a place — not a description of an internal function, service, or merchandise area.
Examples of entity types that qualify include:
| Place Type | Examples |
|---|---|
| Companies & franchises | Restaurants, hotels, day care centers, law firms, and company headquarters |
| Non-profit organizations | Schools, churches, museums, and foundations |
| Government offices | Offices at all levels of government, except restricted-access offices |
| Housing complexes | Apartment complexes (not individual apartments) |
| Landmarks | Public monuments, bridges, and squares |
| Transit stations and airports | Metro and subway stations, railway stations, and bus stops |
| Parking lots | Public and paid lots, except restricted-access parking lots |
| Public amenities | Restrooms, stairs, and drinking fountains located in parks, public spaces, and malls |
| Seasonal businesses | Ski resorts, Christmas tree farms |
| Farmers markets | Regularly scheduled open-air or enclosed markets |
| Areas of Interest | Parks, beaches, lakes, and mountains |
| Retail chains | Chain businesses with more than one place, including franchises |
| Enclosed places | Named businesses or services physically located inside another place, such as a store inside a mall |
What Does Not Qualify
Departments and Internal Subdivisions
The most common submission error is treating an organizational department or merchandise area as a location. A department exists within a business — it is not a separate business. Visitors navigate to the parent location, not to the department independently.
This applies across verticals. A radiology department is a subdivision of a hospital. A history department is a subdivision of a university. An electronics department is a merchandise area within a retailer. An in-store bakery or deli counter is part of the shopping experience, not a separate destination. None of these have an independent customer-facing identity that would allow a member of the public to meaningfully search for them and navigate to them as distinct places.
Branded service counters inside big box retailers, grocery stores, hospitals or medical centers, and universities or colleges — pharmacies, optical centers, tire and auto centers, emergency departments, academic departments, and similar — are evaluated differently; see Colocated Services below.
Utility and Service Spaces
Fitting rooms, loading docks, and storage rooms serve internal operations or the basic needs of a location's visitors. They are not independently identifiable destinations.
Administrative and Structural Designations
Floors, wings, and zones identified only by alphanumeric labels or internal naming conventions — such as "Floor 3", "East Wing", or "Zone B" — are structural designations, not recognizable places.
Colocated Services in Large Parent Facilities
Big box retailers, grocery stores, hospitals or medical centers, and universities or colleges often contain branded service counters or units — pharmacies, optical centers, tire and auto centers, fuel centers, bank branches, emergency departments, and similar — that operate alongside the parent facility's core offering. Unlike departments, these services may qualify for capture as their own location record.
A colocated service may qualify as its own location when it carries a distinct brand and differs from the parent facility in category, contact information, point of sale, or entrance. A colocated service does not qualify as its own location — and should instead be represented as an attribute of the parent, such as separate service hours — when it differs from the parent only in hours or its location within the facility (for example, an aisle, section, or floor).
For the full decision criteria and examples, see Colocated Services in the full normative guidance.
The Test
When you are unsure whether an entity in your data qualifies, ask:
Could a member of the public, unfamiliar with this location, meaningfully search for it by name and expect to find and navigate to a distinct physical place?
If the answer is no, the entity should not be submitted as a location record.
Locations That Cannot Be Created
Regardless of the entity type, a location record cannot be created for:
- An entity with no physical presence
- An entity that operates exclusively through a website
- An entity at a residential address
- A mobile business
- An entity that cannot be physically visited by a member of the public
Related
| Brand Claim Process | How brands and locations are verified in Apple Business |
| Data Qualification | Submitting data for Apple Business evaluation |
| Location Capture Eligibility | Full normative rules and detailed examples |
| Location API | Manage location resources |