For AI & data

Everything public on Tides & Tails — the charter directory, the bait & tackle shops, the waters, the species guides and the lure database — is also published as plain JSON so an AI assistant or a script can read it without scraping pages. This page says what the data is, how to ask for it, how fresh it is, and the few rules for using it.

What the data is

Six catalogs, one JSON file each, plus a search endpoint that cuts across the charters and the shops. Every listing in the directory is a real, working business we verified against its own website or phone line; the sample profiles we use to demonstrate the marketplace are never included in any feed or search result. Where a fact isn't published — a rate, a boat length, a badge — the field is null or empty. Nothing is guessed.

Where the data lives

Every record type is published two or three ways: as an HTML page that carries a schema.org block you can read straight from the markup, as a JSON feed, and — for the directory and the waters — through the assistant plug-in below. The table says where each one is. The full map in one text file is /llms.txt; the whole catalog in one document is /llms-full.txt; the sitemap index at /sitemap.xml has one map per record type.

Record typeHTML pageJSON feedschema.org
Waters / fisheries/locations/<slug>/feed/locations.jsonPlace (BodyOfWater)
Species/species/<slug>/feed/species.jsonTaxon
Regulations by state/regulations#<STATE>HTML onlyDataset (per state)
Charters/charters/<water-slug>/feed/charters.jsonLocalBusiness
Bait & tackle shops/charters/<water-slug> (shown alongside the charters)/feed/bait-shops.jsonLocalBusiness
Lures & bait/lures/feed/lures.json
Articles/articles/<slug>/feed/articles.jsonArticle
Near-me pages/near-me/<kind>/<state-slug>/feed/search.json?lat=&lon=&radius=

The map in one text file: https://www.tidesandtails.net/llms.txt. The whole catalog in one document: https://www.tidesandtails.net/llms-full.txt. Sitemap index: https://www.tidesandtails.net/sitemap.xml.

How to query it

The search endpoint is a normal GET request that returns JSON. Every parameter is optional; leave them all off and you get the whole directory, 25 at a time. An unknown value (say, type=boats) comes back as a 400 with an error message naming the parameter. Results are flat — one object per listing — and each carries the URL of its page on this site.

If you would rather not build requests by hand, the OpenAPI file describes every parameter and field, and the feed index lists every static feed.

Search endpoint: GET https://www.tidesandtails.net/feed/search.json

Three examples to copy

Parameters

type
charters, bait-shops or all (the default).
water
The water's slug, e.g. destin or tampa-bay. The waters feed lists them all.
town
Part of a town name, any case.
coast
gulf, atlantic or pacific.
species
A species id from the catalogs, e.g. red-drum, speckled-trout, snook.
trip
inshore or offshore (charters only).
badge
verified, featured or responds-fast. Repeat it to require more than one.
maxPrice
Only listings with at least one trip package at or under this price in dollars. Listings with no published packages drop out when you set it.
q
Free text, matched against the name, town, water and description.
page and limit
Page starts at 1; limit defaults to 25 and tops out at 50.
lat and lon
Your position in decimal degrees. Set both and the results come back sorted by distance, nearest first, and meta.nearestWaters lists the covered waters closest to you.
radius
How far to look from lat/lon, in miles. Defaults to 75, tops out at 300. Ignored without lat and lon.

Near me, without a query

Each near-me page also has a static version per state at /near-me/<kind>/<state-slug> (texas, louisiana, mississippi, alabama, florida, georgia, south-carolina, north-carolina, maryland, california).

Machine-readable description: https://www.tidesandtails.net/feed/openapi.json. Feed index: https://www.tidesandtails.net/feed/index.json. Site summary for crawlers: https://www.tidesandtails.net/llms.txt.

How fresh it is

The feeds are generated from the live catalog each time they are requested and cached for five minutes, so a newly approved listing or a fresh trust badge shows up within minutes. The static catalogs (species, lures, waters) change when we edit them and are cached for an hour. Each response carries the time it was generated.

The rules

The data is free to read, quote and build on. In return: credit “Tides & Tails” and link to the listing's URL (the url field on every result) whenever you show a business from our directory. Do not republish the phone numbers as a standalone directory — send people to the listing instead, where the owner can keep it current.

The conditions readings on the site — tides, water temperature, wind, the bite outlook — are for planning a fishing day, not for navigation. They are not published in the feeds, and quoting them as a navigation aid is outside what our Terms allow.

The full wording is in our Terms of Service.

Connect an assistant

Tides & Tails also speaks MCP (the Model Context Protocol). Add https://www.tidesandtails.net/api/mcp as a custom connector / MCP server in Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor; it exposes search_charters, search_bait_shops and get_water, so the assistant can answer “who runs inshore trips out of Destin?” from the same data as the search endpoint, with the same rules attached.

MCP endpoint: https://www.tidesandtails.net/api/mcp