Tools & systems

Attio's 152 Company Categories: The Full List

The industry taxonomy Attio ships out of the box, pulled straight from the API

August 19, 2026

Attio ships 152 options on the categories attribute of its Companies object. That is the closest thing Attio has to a built-in industry field, and as far as I can tell the full list of values is not published anywhere in their help docs or API reference. So here it is, pulled live from the API on August 19, 2026, in the order Attio returns it.

If the list is all you came for, jump straight to it. It is copy-paste ready.

On this page

The 152 categories (the list itself)
Why I pulled it
A word of caution before you use this
How to pull it yourself
What the attribute actually is
What "writable" does not mean
Three things to notice about the list
Should you build your own industry field?

Why I pulled it

I was setting up a CRM in Attio and had to answer a boring but consequential question: do we build our own industry field, or lean on what Attio already gives us?

You cannot answer that without seeing the options. Attio's docs tell you the categories attribute exists and that it is enriched automatically, but they do not tell you what the possible values are. A dropdown you cannot see is impossible to plan reporting around. Are the values granular or broad? Is "Software" in there? Does it distinguish B2B from B2C? Those answers change whether you segment on this field or replace it.

The only way to find out was to ask the API directly. Once I had the list, it seemed worth publishing rather than leaving in a private note, because anyone evaluating Attio has to make the same call.

A word of caution before you use this

This is a snapshot, not a spec. Attio maintains this taxonomy on its side and enriches company records against it automatically, which means the option set can change without any action from you and without a changelog entry you will notice. Values may be added, renamed, or archived.

I will update this post as best I can when I spot changes, but treat it as a reference for planning, not a contract. If the exact values matter to your build, for example if you are mapping them to another system or hardcoding them in an automation, pull the list yourself and pull it again before you ship. I expect drift to be minor rather than wholesale, but minor drift is still enough to break a mapping.

How to pull it yourself

One authenticated GET request:

GET /v2/objects/companies/attributes/categories/options

That endpoint takes no pagination parameters and returns every option in a single call, so there is no cursor to loop through. Add ?show_archived=true to include archived options. When I ran it, there were zero archived options, so the 152 below are the complete set, live and archived alike.

What the attribute actually is

Worth knowing before you design around it:

Property	Value
Type	`select`
Multi-select	`true`
Writable	`true`
System attribute	yes

Two of those have consequences you will feel immediately. First, it is multi-select, so a record can carry several categories at once and any report you build has to handle that. Counting companies by category will not sum to your total company count. Second, Attio populates it automatically from the company domain. This field is not sitting empty waiting for your team to fill it in. It arrives with data, which is genuinely useful, and it also means you are inheriting someone else's judgment about what each company does.

What "writable" does not mean

is_writable: true is the easiest property on that table to misread, and the distinction matters before you plan anything around this field.

What it means: you can change which of the existing options are applied to a record. Pick categories by hand in the UI, set them in a CSV import, or write them through the API. You are not stuck with whatever Attio's enrichment decided.

What it does not mean: you cannot add to the list, or edit it. categories is a system attribute, and Attio's own documentation is explicit about what that implies: "System attributes on Companies are not editable: their names, configuration, and options (for select and multi-select attributes) cannot be changed." Attio does have an API for creating select options, but it applies to attributes you created, not to system ones.

So the 152 values below are a closed set. You cannot add a 153rd, you cannot rename one, and you cannot delete one. Nor can you sneak a new value in by writing it to a record. From the API reference on select attributes: "If you attempt to write a value where the ID or title cannot be found, you will receive an error rather than create a new select option." An unrecognized value is rejected, not silently created.

That is the real dividing line for planning. If your business needs a category Attio does not ship, the answer is never "add it to categories." It is a custom select attribute of your own, which you then own and maintain. You can use Attio's taxonomy or you can build your own. You cannot extend theirs.

One thing I have not tested and would not assume: whether Attio's enrichment later re-runs and overwrites a category you set by hand. If you plan to rely on manual overrides at scale, try it on a throwaway record first and watch what happens over a few days.

Three things to notice about the list

It mixes industries with business models. B2B, B2C, Enterprise, and Corporate & Business are not industries in any normal sense. If you segment on this field expecting clean industry buckets, those four will muddy it.

There are near-duplicates. E-Commerce & Marketplaces and E-commerce. Finance and Financial Services. Energy, Utilities, and Energy & Utilities. Marketplace alongside E-Commerce & Marketplaces. Because the field is multi-select and enriched automatically, a single company can end up tagged with two overlapping values. Plan your groupings accordingly, and expect to collapse some of these into one bucket for reporting.

The sort order is case-sensitive. The API returns the options alphabetically, but capital letters sort before lowercase ones. That is why E-Commerce & Marketplaces lands before E-commerce, ISP sits above Import & Export, and SAAS appears between Retail and Sanitization Services. Harmless once you know, mildly confusing when you are scanning for a value and cannot find it.

One more: there is no plain Software option. The closest are SAAS, Information Technology & Services, Web Services & Apps, and Technology. If you sell to software companies, decide up front which of those you treat as your segment.

Should you build your own industry field?

For most teams, start with what Attio gives you. It arrives populated, it costs you nothing to maintain, and a field with imperfect data in it beats a perfect field that is empty because nobody fills it in.

Build your own only when you can name the decision the native field cannot support. If your segments are "mid-market logistics" and "enterprise SaaS," no generic taxonomy is going to draw that line for you, and you need your own field. If you just want a rough sense of who is in your pipeline, categories already does that.

That is the same test I would apply to any tool decision: define the job first, then decide whether the built-in option does it. I wrote about that at more length in How to Choose the Right SaaS for B2B Sales and Marketing.

Trying Attio

If this post is part of an evaluation and you decide to go ahead, you can start an Attio account with 10% off through my referral link.

Disclosure: that is a referral link. You get 10% off, and I may receive a credit, at no extra cost to you. I pulled this list because I was configuring Attio for real client work, which is the only reason the post exists. Nobody paid for the recommendation.

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