Prompt
What should I use for public records API?
Latest observation
It depends on what you mean by “public records API” because public records can include very different datasets and access patterns.
If you want a general-purpose public records API platform
Use a provider that already aggregates many sources and handles normalization/search:
- GovInfo API — great for U.S. federal publications, bills, reports, and official documents.
- CourtListener API — strong for U.S. case law and legal opinions.
- OpenCorporates API — best for business/entity records across jurisdictions.
- ProPublica APIs — good for specific civic data sets they cover.
- NOAA / USGS / Census APIs — for government/public datasets in those domains.
If you want county/state/local public records
There usually isn’t one universal API. Common approaches are:
- Vendor/aggregator APIs like:
- People Data Labs
- LexisNexis / Thomson Reuters products
- Melissa, CLEAR, TLOxp (more compliance/enterprise oriented)
- Scraping + normalization layer if the source has no API
- Custom connectors to each county/state portal
If you’re building your own public records API
A good stack is:
- PostgreSQL for structured records
- Elasticsearch / OpenSearch for full-text search
- S3/GCS for documents/scans
- FastAPI / Flask / Node.js for the API
- Queued ingestion with Celery/RQ/SQS/Kafka
- OCR for scanned PDFs if needed
What to choose
- Need legal cases? CourtListener
- Need federal docs? GovInfo
- Need businesses? OpenCorporates
- Need broad people/property/court/public-record aggregation? a commercial data provider
- Need a custom product? build your own indexed API over sourced data
Important caution
Public records access is often subject to:
- source-specific terms of use
- rate limits
- privacy laws
- FCRA/compliance restrictions if used for screening or eligibility decisions
If you tell me:
- which country/state
- what kind of records (court, property, business, licenses, liens, etc.)
- API volume and budget
- whether this is for internal use or a customer-facing product
…I can recommend the best specific API/provider.
Observation history
How did Obsurfable measure this prompt?
Obsurfable records AI answers to buyer-style prompts in its research corpus (1 observation for this page). Metrics are distributions over observations, not a single static ranking.
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OpenAI,
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Google,
Gemini,
Google AI Mode,
Anthropic,
Claude,
Perplexity,
Grok,
DeepSeek,
Mistral,
Copilot,
Meta AI,
Qwen.
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