Goal-directed behavior requires the coordinated activity of sensory and motor areas across the brain. Recent advances in large-scale neural recordings allow studying brain-wide dynamics during behavior at cellular resolution. We used mesoscale calcium imaging to record the activity of up to ~30,000 neurons simultaneously (~1,000,000 neurons total) from over 10 cortical areas while mice performed a novel goal-directed naturalistic behavior. The behavior consisted of multipositional tongue-reaching movements to a target to obtain a water reward, with the target presented on a grid (typically consisting of 4x4 possible target positions) in front of the mouse’s face. This behavior, which does not require training, allowed studying neural activity simultaneously across multiple cortical regions before neural activity is shaped by learning a specific task. Our analysis revealed a distinct task-related representation in different cortical areas, which evolved across time in some of the areas. Taken together, our results demonstrate a distributed yet specialized neural representation of task-related activity across the cortex during naturalistic goal-directed behavior.