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Forward geocode: turn a text query (address, place name, or landmark) into geographic coordinates. Results are ranked by relevance and include a confidence score. You can bias results towards a location with focus_lat+focus_lon, or restrict to specific countries with country (comma-separated ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 codes). Supply focus_lat+focus_lon whenever you have any spatial context — a visible viewport, a previous result, a known anchor. Common place names like “Cambridge”, “Bath”, or “Lebanon” exist in several countries; a focus point picks the one the user means.

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Example prompts

  • “Where is Buckingham Palace?”
  • “Find the coordinates for 10 Downing Street, London”
  • “Geocode ‘Empire State Building’ and tell me the lat/lng”
  • “What are the coordinates for Springfield? I mean the one in Illinois.”

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What you get back

A list of matching locations, each with coordinates (lat/lng), a full label, country, region, district (borough or municipality, e.g. “City of Westminster”), locality, optional confidence score (omitted when 1.0; present when below), and the result type (venue, address, street, locality, etc.). When all results share the same country / country_code / region, those fields are hoisted to a top-level context object so they aren’t repeated on every result. Read shared admin from context, per-result variation from results[i].

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Tips for landmark queries

  • Qualify with city context. "Big Ben, London" resolves much more reliably than "Big Ben" alone — the comma form lets the parser treat the city as administrative context.
  • Plain street addresses don’t need extra context — "10 Downing Street, London" is enough.
If you’re driving the tool from an LLM, mentioning these hints in the system prompt often improves results without any code changes.

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Map rendering

Responses include a render envelope with a point layer for the matched candidates (per-feature properties carries name, label, place_type, confidence). Pass compact: true for summary-only responses. See response defaults & controls and render envelopes.

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Example response

{
  "structuredContent": {
    "results": [
      {
        "name": "Buckingham Palace",
        "label": "Buckingham Palace, London, England, United Kingdom",
        "coordinates": { "lat": 51.501, "lng": -0.142 },
        "place_type": "venue"
      }
    ],
    "context": { "country": "United Kingdom", "country_code": "GBR" },
    "render": [
      { "kind": "point", "label": "Geocoded matches", "data": {/* FeatureCollection */}, "bbox": [/* … */] }
    ]
  }
}