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Changelog

What's changed in the Overture Maps API, newest first. This covers two streams:

  • API — new endpoints, fields, filters and behaviour in this API.
  • Data — the monthly Overture Maps data releases that flow through to your query results (new categories, coverage, schema changes). We summarise the parts that affect API callers; the full upstream notes are linked on each entry.

Overture releases roughly monthly (mid-month). New here? Start with the introduction.

2026-10 · API: partial-name search​

  • New name_prefix filter on /places. Matches places whose name, or a word in it, starts with the text you pass, so it can back a type-ahead location field. Combine it with lat/lng and a small limit for the nearest matches first.

2026-09-23 · Data — Overture 2026-09-23.0 (schema v2.0.0)​

  • categories is gone upstream. Overture's schema v2.0.0 removes the places categories property entirely, in favour of taxonomy and basic_category. This API keeps the categories response field and filter working, now derived from taxonomy, and /places/categories now lists taxonomy values. The values themselves now follow the taxonomy vocabulary, so any legacy category string that differs from its taxonomy equivalent will stop matching. If you filter on specific strings, use the taxonomy filter.
  • Places up 10.6% to 81.5M. BrightQuery expanded beyond the US into Germany, Italy and Denmark (2.29M to 10.26M places) and added more US places under services_and_business. Expect many new results in those countries.
  • operating_status=open returns far more. Places marked open grew 66.2%, from 11.05M to 18.36M.
  • Addresses: source labels have changed. sources[].dataset values on /addresses now use a provider/resource form, so update any code that filters or groups on those strings. record_id, update_time and license are now populated on every address source. Coverage grew 0.29% to 474.2M, with new data for New Caledonia, French Polynesia, three Taiwanese counties and New Orleans, plus roughly 1M new addresses in Italy with better location precision.
  • Buildings: new shelter class on around 321,000 buildings, many of them previously unclassed civic buildings. If you filter on class via /places/buildings, re-check those. Buildings +0.17% to 2.53bn, building parts +3.39%.
  • Base: new IDs for every land_use feature. Overture changed how base-theme IDs are generated, so land_use IDs from /base have all changed; don't rely on IDs cached before this release. land_use grew 0.86%, land_cover is unchanged.
  • Divisions saw only minor, incremental changes (+0.63%). Transportation road length is up 263,339 km (+0.28%) and TomTom segments up 5.5%.
  • Full upstream notes: Overture 2026-09-23 release.

2026-08-19 · Data — Overture 2026-08-19.0 (schema v1.18.0)​

  • Last release before categories disappears. Overture removes the categories property in the September 2026 release, replaced by basic_category and taxonomy. If you filter or match on specific category strings, move to the taxonomy filter this month. Overture also shipped further taxonomy and category clean-up in this release, so some places will have shifted category.
  • operating_status is much better populated. 1.64M more places now carry an "open" status, so operating_status=open returns a good deal more than it did in July. Places with no signal stay null and are still excluded when you use the filter.
  • US place coverage shifted source mix. BrightQuery nearly tripled its US contribution (+1.46M places, +175%) and AllThePlaces grew 13.4% (+190,735). Total places fell 0.8% to 73.63M as de-duplication and clean-up removed more than the new sources added, so expect some IDs you cached in July to have gone.
  • Buildings: building is down 0.61% to 2.53bn while building_part is up 1.45%. Microsoft ML Buildings (+13.09M) and OpenStreetMap (+3.81M) both extended coverage, and hundreds of thousands of buildings picked up updated num_floors, height and roof_shape. Worth a re-pull if you use those on /places/buildings.
  • Base: infrastructure +1.80%, land +1.62%, land_use +1.25%, water +0.82%. Transit features grew across parking, parking_space, bus_stop, stop_position and bicycle_parking, and mountain landforms grew in every class.
  • Divisions: geometry refinements were the main change this month, and some Vietnamese microhood divisions were reclassified as neighborhood. If you match on subtype, re-check those.
  • Transportation: road length is up 414,396 km (+0.45%) and TomTom segments up 5%, with better road_surface, class and access_restrictions coverage.
  • Addresses: a small net gain (+0.02%) with refreshed inputs from Fresno County, CA and Statistics Canada, plus new points from LINZ (New Zealand) and ICAR.
  • Schema stays at v1.18.0, so no breaking schema changes this month.
  • Full upstream notes: Overture 2026-08-19 release.

August 2026 · API updates​

  • name filter on /places and /places/buildings. Case-insensitive exact match against the place's primary name and any localised common name. It narrows an existing lat/lng/radius or country search rather than acting as a standalone text search, and it counts as a narrowing filter for country-level queries. See Places.
  • /places/buildings radius is now capped at 2,000 m. Building lookups cost more per metre of radius, so wider searches are rejected rather than run slowly. Page through results with limit and page instead. See Pagination.

2026-07-22 · Data — Overture 2026-07-22.0 (schema v1.18.0)​

  • Three new place categories are now queryable: arts_and_entertainment, lodging and cultural_and_historic (previously filtered out). Use them via categories or taxonomy.
  • Better place matching upstream — more matched places and fewer duplicates across all countries.
  • Heads-up — categories is being retired. Overture deprecated the categories property and will remove it in the September 2026 release, replaced by basic_category + taxonomy. This API keeps the categories field and filter working (derived from the taxonomy), but if you match on specific category strings, move to the taxonomy filter before September.
  • Full upstream notes: Overture 2026-07-22 release.

July 2026 · API updates​

  • Pagination on every search endpoint — page (0-indexed) with limit as the page size, and Pagination-Count / Pagination-Page / Pagination-Limit response headers. Ordering is deterministic so pages never overlap. See Pagination.
  • has_contact filter — return only places that already have a website, phone, email or social (comma-separated, OR-matched). Ideal for lead lists and verification.
  • Contact details by default — websites, phones, emails and socials are now always in the response when Overture has them; no parameter needed.
  • Brand enrichment — add enrichment_fields=brand to get ext_brand (logo, official website, industry, parent organisation) from Wikidata, on ~1.5M places across ~3,000 chains.
  • New fields — taxonomy (hierarchy-aware), basic_category, operating_status and admin_level, ahead of the upstream category migration.
  • Faster, cheaper place queries — the /places backend now prunes spatially, so lat/lng radius queries return quicker.
  • Demo key scoped to nearby search — DEMO-API-KEY now supports lat/lng radius queries only; country-level pulls need a free API key.
  • New: Overture Maps MCP server — connect the API to Claude and other LLM tools.
  • New guides — Build a local business directory and Map every location of a retail chain.