How Do You Search Florida Businesses by Industry?
The official Florida Sunbiz website (sunbiz.org) does not support searching businesses by industry type. However, Sunbiz Daily categorizes every filing by industry to automatically categorize every new Florida business by industry, enabling searches like "restaurants in Miami" or "construction companies in Orlando" that are impossible on Sunbiz.org.
Why Can't You Search by Industry on Sunbiz.org?
The Florida Division of Corporations (Sunbiz) maintains the official registry of all business entities in the state. However, Sunbiz.org only allows searches by exact business name, document number, or officer/registered agent name. There is no industry code, category, or SIC/NAICS classification in the Sunbiz filing data.
This means if you want to find all new restaurants, law firms, or construction companies registered in Florida, the official Sunbiz website cannot help you. Enterprise tools like ZoomInfo and Dun & Bradstreet offer industry filtering but charge hundreds of dollars per month.
How Sunbiz Daily Adds Industry Categories
Sunbiz Daily processes the same public data from the Florida Division of Corporations every business day. After parsing each new filing, a curated set of keyword rules is matched against the business name to determine the most likely industry category. For example, "Joe's Pizza & Wings LLC" is categorized as "Restaurant" and "Sunshine Plumbing Services Inc" as "Plumbing."
These categories enable the industry-based searching and filtering that the official
Sunbiz.org website does not support. There are around 130 of them — Restaurant,
Construction, Healthcare Services, Cleaning Services, Hair Salon, Financial Services,
Trucking & Freight and many more. The full list is available from the API at
/api/v2/industries/, and the search and table filters offer the same vocabulary.
Two things worth knowing about how this works. Because a category comes from the business name alone, it reflects what the name suggests rather than verified activity — an agency named "Sunshine Plumbing Holdings LLC" lands in a trade category even if it only holds property. And a name that matches no rule is categorized General Business, which means "the name gave no signal", not "this is a general business". If you are searching a category exhaustively, expect to miss businesses whose names simply don't say what they do.
How to Search by Industry on Sunbiz Daily
- Use natural language search: Visit the search page and type a query like "restaurants in Miami," "plumbers near 33101," or "new construction companies in Tampa." The AI query parser extracts your industry and location filters automatically.
- Use the filings table: Go to the filings table and use the Industry filter in the sidebar to select a specific industry category, optionally combined with city and filing type filters.
- Browse statistics: Visit the statistics page to see the most common industries among new Florida business registrations and click through to view filings in each category.