Geocoding & Place Search
Amazon Location Service Places provides geocoding, reverse geocoding, place search, and autocomplete APIs for your applications. Convert street addresses into geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude), find the address for a set of coordinates, search for nearby businesses and points of interest, standardize and normalize address data, and retrieve business details like contact information, categories, and operating hours.
Geocode and Complete Features
Search and Explore Features
Additional Features
By the Numbers
Search & Discovery Use Cases
How your customers can find nearby places, discover local businesses, and enter addresses faster at checkout.
Provide real-time address autocomplete suggestions as your customers type their location into websites or apps. Address autofill helps customers ensure that their delivery or pickup location matches your known locations. Streamline address entry and eliminate frustrating errors by matching customer inputs to your supported locations. Reduce cart abandonment, boost conversions, and create a frictionless checkout journey.
Help your customers find the closest relevant places with nearby search. Show nearby schools, grocery stores, parks, and other points of interest within a specified radius of any location. Build a list of businesses you want to market your services to. Search by category and get information including addresses, geocodes, and other place details.
Inform your customers with the most current details about local businesses. Search local businesses by name or category in a specific area to enhance your customers' experience or inform business decisions. Access POI data including addresses, coordinates, categories, and contact details.
Geocoding & Address Quality Use Cases
How your business can geocode addresses for routing and logistics, standardize address databases, and validate deliverability.
Normalize and standardize your customer address database using the Geocode API. Address standardization returns structured address components, geographic coordinates, postal code details, and time zone information. Use the Storage option to save enriched data in your database for analytics, business decisions, and marketing programs.
Geocode delivery addresses and pickup locations into geographic coordinates so they can be used with routing APIs to calculate optimal paths. Geocoding is the first step in any delivery or rideshare workflow — converting customer-entered addresses into coordinates that route planners, dispatch systems, and driver apps can use for navigation, ETAs, and multi-stop sequencing.
Clean and verify your customer address database with bulk address validation. Check addresses for accuracy, correct formatting errors, and confirm deliverability. Address verification helps reduce failed deliveries, improve CRM data quality, and support compliance workflows. Validate mailing addresses across domestic and international records.
Place APIs at a glance
|
API
|
What it does
|
Input
|
Output
|
Storage Supported
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Geocode
|
Convert address to coordinates |
Address or place name |
Coordinates, standardized address components, match scores, postal code details, time zone |
Yes |
|
Reverse Geocode
|
Convert coordinates to address |
Latitude/longitude |
Address, place type, postal details |
Yes |
|
Autocomplete
|
Suggest addresses as user types |
Partial text (keystrokes) |
Matching street addresses |
No |
|
Suggest
|
Predict places from partial text |
Partial text (keystrokes) |
Matching places and addresses |
No |
|
Search Text
|
Find places by name or category |
Text query |
Places with coordinates, contacts, opening hours |
Yes |
|
Search Nearby
|
Find places near a location |
Coordinates + radius |
Nearby places with addresses, coordinates, business details |
Yes |
Get Started with Amazon Location
Frequently Asked Questions
Page topics
What is geocoding?
Geocoding is the process of converting a human-readable address or place name into geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude). For example, geocoding turns "350 5th Avenue, New York, NY" into coordinates your application can use for mapping, routing, or analytics. Amazon Location Service provides a Geocode API that returns coordinates along with standardized address components, match scores, and time zone information.
How do I find the geocode for an address?
Send the address to the Amazon Location Service Geocode API as a text query or as structured components (street, city, postal code, country). The API returns geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude), standardized address components, and match scores indicating how accurately the result aligns with your input. You can call the API through the AWS SDK, CLI, or REST endpoint.
How do I get started with geocoding?
Sign in to the AWS Console, navigate to Amazon Location Service, and start making Geocode API calls. You can use the AWS SDK, CLI, or REST API. No infrastructure setup is required — just authenticate with your AWS credentials and send your first geocoding request.
What is the difference between forward and reverse geocoding?
Forward geocoding converts an address into geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude). Reverse geocoding does the opposite — it converts coordinates into a human-readable address. For example, forward geocoding turns "1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington DC" into a coordinate pair, while reverse geocoding turns a GPS coordinate into a street address. Both are available through the Amazon Location Service Places APIs.
What are Autocomplete and Suggest? How are they different?
Autocomplete and Suggest both provide real-time predictions as users type, but they serve different purposes. Autocomplete converts partial keystrokes into valid street addresses — ideal for address entry at checkout. Suggest predicts relevant places, businesses, and landmarks — ideal for place search and discovery. Use Autocomplete when you need a deliverable address, and Suggest when you want to help users find a place or point of interest.
Can I use geocoding for address standardization?
Yes. The Amazon Location Service Geocode API normalizes and standardizes addresses as part of the geocoding process. It returns structured address components in a consistent format, corrects formatting inconsistencies, and adds postal code details and time zone information. You can store the standardized results in your database by setting the IntendedUse parameter to Storage.
What is address validation?
Bulk address validation is the process of checking whether a mailing address is real, correctly formatted, and deliverable. It works as an address check that verifies addresses against authoritative data, corrects common errors, and standardizes formatting. Amazon Location Service provides bulk address validation to help you clean customer databases, reduce failed deliveries, and improve data quality across your systems.