# Cities — AutoSugges platform dataset

## How do I add Cities autocomplete to my app?

Cities is a free AutoSugges reference list of 37,156 items. Query it with your publishable key as the key parameter and the typed text as q, after at least two characters. Results come back pre-ranked from the edge, ten by default, ready for the AutoSugges React, React Native or HTML component.

34,149 cities of 15,000 people or more, grouped by state and country. Contains data from GeoNames (geonames.org), CC BY 4.0.

37156 items, across levels: country, state, city.
Level breakdown: country: 244, state: 2763, city: 34149.

## Provenance
Source: GeoNames (https://download.geonames.org/export/dump/cities15000.zip)
Retrieved: 2026-09-23, effective version cities15000 and admin1CodesASCII both 2026-09-24T01:53:22Z (Last-Modified; GeoNames publishes no version label)
Authority: authoritative
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), both files. Changes made: cities15000 filtered and restructured by country and first-order division, joined to admin1CodesASCII for the division names. (cc_by)
Attribution: Contains data from GeoNames (geonames.org) — cities15000 and admin1CodesASCII — CC BY 4.0, filtered and restructured by AutoSugges.
Export allowed: yes

## Availability
Free

## Authority
Authoritative

## Dataset kind
Reference list

## Worked example
```json
{
  "value": "1138958",
  "displayValue": "Kabul",
  "description": "Kabul, Afghanistan",
  "aliases": [
    "Kabul"
  ],
  "metadata": {
    "region": "Kabul, Afghanistan",
    "geonameid": "1138958",
    "countryCode": "AF",
    "admin1Code": "13",
    "population": 4434550,
    "lat": 34.52813,
    "lon": 69.17233,
    "timezone": "Asia/Kabul"
  },
  "ancestors": [
    {
      "value": "AF",
      "displayValue": "Afghanistan"
    },
    {
      "value": "AF.13",
      "displayValue": "Kabul"
    }
  ]
}
```

## Query it
```
/v1/query?key=YOUR_PUBLISHABLE_KEY&q=kabul
```

A publishable key is public by design and belongs in client code as written; it is not a secret.

## Frequently asked questions

### What is in the Cities dataset?

34,149 cities of 15,000 people or more, grouped by state and country. Contains data from GeoNames (geonames.org), CC BY 4.0. It has 37,156 items. Its source is GeoNames. Authority: Authoritative. Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), both files. Changes made: cities15000 filtered and restructured by country and first-order division, joined to admin1CodesASCII for the division names. Refresh cadence: Daily upstream; no archived versions, so dataset.json is the reproducible artefact.

### Is the Cities dataset free?

AutoSugges-published free datasets are never priced on their own — every plan includes all of them. What a plan prices is how many queries you may make, not which free list you may query. A few catalog entries are licensed from a third party or supplied by you, and those carry their own access terms, shown on that dataset's own page.

### How do I query Cities?

Call GET /v1/query with your publishable key as the key parameter and the typed text as q, or mount the AutoSugges component for React, React Native or HTML. The runtime answers from the edge and never reads a database.

### What is the minimum number of characters before a query runs?

Two by default. A list owner can change the minimum, but it can never be 1. The client reads the real value from bootstrap and sends no request below it, so do not hardcode it.

### How long does the client wait after typing before it queries?

150 milliseconds by default. The value is delivered through bootstrap and a list owner can raise it, so the client uses the policy value rather than a constant.

### What happens when my query quota runs out?

The runtime returns a structured quota_exceeded response that carries no items and no placeholder suggestions, so exhaustion is never mistaken for no results. Render it from the typed error code and prompt an upgrade.

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Canonical page: https://autosugges.com/datasets/cities