What is PlaceField?
PlaceField is a location autocomplete API and JavaScript widget for products and forms that need city, municipality, administrative area, region, and country suggestions.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Direct answers about what PlaceField does, what it does not do, and how it fits city, administrative area, region, and country autocomplete integrations.
Product scope
PlaceField is intentionally narrow. These answers describe the current product and API behavior, not a future maps or address platform.
Is PlaceField an address autocomplete API?
No. PlaceField does not validate, complete, or normalize street addresses. It is focused on city, administrative area, region, and country autocomplete.
Is PlaceField a geocoding API?
PlaceField supports a narrow geocoding-style use case for integrations: turning city, region, and country searches into structured place records with coordinates when available. It is not a general address geocoding or reverse geocoding platform.
Does PlaceField replace Google Places Autocomplete?
PlaceField can be a focused alternative when your product only needs city, region, and country suggestions. It does not replace Google Maps, address autocomplete, POI search, routing, or map UI.
Does PlaceField search POIs or businesses?
No. PlaceField is designed to avoid POI, venue, business, street-name, and address-fragment clutter in location fields.
Does PlaceField collect street addresses?
No. PlaceField returns administrative places such as cities, regions, and countries. It is useful when street-level location is unnecessary or too precise for the workflow.
API behavior
The API exposes one autocomplete endpoint. Different field shapes use parameters and result types, not separate APIs per location layer.
What place types does PlaceField return?
Supported place types include city, municipality, town, parish, island, state, province, region, and country. The default preset focuses on city, municipality, state, province, and country; use broad or explicit types for islands and smaller localities.
Does PlaceField return coordinates?
Yes, autocomplete results include coordinates.lat and coordinates.lon when the active dataset has coordinates for that result.
Can I bias results by country?
Yes. Use country for a single-country ranking bias, countries for a hard ISO country-code allowlist, and countryMode=filter only when results must stay inside one supplied country.
Can PlaceField rank by the user’s geography?
Yes. By default, geoBias=country prefers the requester’s country when no explicit country is supplied. Pass geoBias=nearby to prefer closer places, or geoBias=none for worldwide ranking.
Which response languages are supported?
The API currently supports en, pt, es, and fr as response language preferences. The default is en.
What should I store after a user selects a result?
Store the stable PlaceField location ID, type, label or name, country, hierarchy, and coordinates when available. Avoid storing only the free-text query.
Integration and attribution
Choose one integration path: direct API, Basic JS, or Full Widget. You do not need all three.
Can I use PlaceField in the browser?
Yes. Browser integrations can use public browser keys with exact allowed origins, Basic JS, or the Full Widget. Secret server keys should stay on your backend.
What is the difference between API, Basic JS, and Full Widget?
Use the API when you want full control. Use Basic JS to attach autocomplete behavior to your own input and UI. Use the Full Widget when you want a ready-made field with bundled styling.
Do I need to show attribution beside every field?
Standard API and widget integrations do not need visible attribution beside every field. PlaceField maintains central hosted dataset attribution at /attributions.
Where can I read implementation details?
Start with the integration docs for widget setup or the API reference for request parameters and response examples.
Have an integration-specific question?
Share what you need the location search to do and we will point you to the right integration path.