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. An Emergency Department is a subdivision of a hospital. A pharmacy counter is a service point within a grocery store. An electronics department is a merchandise area within a retailer. 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.

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.

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