Overture Places

What Overture Places MCP server does

The Overture Places MCP server gives agents access to business and point-of-interest records from the Overture Maps Foundation places theme. Records can include a place name, category, confidence score, address, websites, phone numbers, email addresses, social links, brand information, and contributing source identifiers.

Its three primary tools cover distinct lookup patterns:

• places_search finds businesses by name or category near coordinates, inside a bounding box, or in a city. Results can be filtered by confidence, closed status, and limit.
• places_by_domain finds locations associated with a company’s registrable website domain. It also returns totals and country or region counts.
• places_in_area reports place counts, category breakdowns, and the highest-confidence records for a geographic area.

This makes the server suitable for location research, business-footprint analysis, and area-level points-of-interest counts. It belongs in the Location Services category and is limited to data for the US and UK.

How it works

Hosted access runs through the Pipeworx MCP gateway. A pack-specific endpoint lists the places tools along with shared Pipeworx meta-tools, while the full gateway exposes the broader catalog. The package can also run locally as a stdio MCP server, where only the places tools are exposed and no gateway routing is available.

Each response includes attribution, source and licensing information, and the Overture release used for the result. The default filters remove records below a 0.7 existence-confidence score and places marked permanently closed. Callers can set min_confidence to 0 and enable include_closed when they need the unfiltered range.

Geographic scans cover at most 64 data blocks, approximately 250,000 places. Large searches can return complete: false with a coverage warning. Narrowing a request with a coordinate and radius is the recommended way to obtain a complete localized search. City matching is based on locality names in the address data; ambiguous names select the largest match and report alternatives.

Setup and configuration

For a hosted MCP connection, configure a client with https://gateway.pipeworx.io/overture-places/mcp. The full Pipeworx endpoint, https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp, is another option when broader catalog access is needed. The gateway is keyless for the described usage.

For local execution, configure the package command npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-overture-places as an MCP stdio server. Running that command directly can verify that it starts. A standalone installation does not read an Overture release independently; the README states that calls in that mode fail because there is no release to read.

The Overture Places MCP server can also be called without an MCP client through the gateway’s HTTP tools API, using endpoints such as /v1/tools/places_search.

Tools and capabilities

• Search by business name, category, city, bounding box, or radius around latitude and longitude.
• Find a company’s indexed physical locations by registrable website domain.
• Count places in an area and group the results by category.
• Filter by existence confidence and optionally include closed records.
• Inspect result completeness, hidden-record counts, release dates, source licenses, and attribution.

Limitations and notes

The data covers only the United States and United Kingdom. Requests outside those countries return an outside-coverage result. UK region fields are inconsistent, so omitting region is recommended for UK city searches.

Platform domains such as social networks, link pages, site builders, and listing services are rejected by places_by_domain because they do not identify one company. Domains with more than 5,000 locations are indexed only up to the highest-confidence 5,000, while the response reports the true total and whether the cap applied.

Overture documents duplicate records, junk data, and incomplete properties in this theme. Confidence filtering reduces likely junk but does not deduplicate results. The places theme carries source-dependent CDLA-Permissive-2.0 and Apache-2.0 licensing, and responses provide the applicable attribution and source details. The package itself is licensed under MIT.