How we build the list
The whole method, in the open — because you should be able to judge our work before you trust it.
The one-line version. We take the official register of every new UK company, remove the large majority that aren't real prospects for anyone, and score what's left against evidence you can click and check yourself.
Where the data comes from
Every record starts at Companies House — the UK's official company register — via their public data services, refreshed every day. It's Crown copyright data that anyone may reuse; what you're paying for is never the data itself, but the filtering, verification and enrichment on top of it. Around 2,300 companies are incorporated on a typical weekday. Most are not opportunities for anybody, which is the problem we exist to solve.
What we strip out
- Formation-agent bulk registrations. When dozens of unrelated companies share one registered address, that address is almost always a formation agent or virtual office, not a trading business. We detect these clusters in the data and treat them with heavy suspicion — in some city-centre postcodes they are the majority of the raw feed.
- Shelf and holding entities. Companies with the classic markers of being registered to sit dormant.
- Miscoded sectors. Self-selected industry codes are wrong often enough that we re-check them against the company's name and footprint rather than passing them through.
The trading-evidence score
Every company that survives filtering gets a score from 0 to 3 for signs it's a real venture gearing up to trade — a website, premises, an active footprint beyond the registration itself. Two rules keep it honest:
- ≥1 Any score above zero must carry a clickable evidence link — the page we saw that justifies it. No evidence link, no score. You can check our work on every single lead.
- The score is a clearly labelled, best-effort analytical signal — not a guarantee. We'd rather show you the evidence and let you judge than pretend to certainty the data can't support.
Alongside it come the signals that matter to your trade, such as no accountant on record (a heuristic drawn from the filing pattern, labelled as such) and premises indicators.
What we deliberately don't do
- No directors' personal contact details — not supplied, not sold, not encouraged. Our leads are companies, reached through business channels.
- No padded lists. A quiet week in your patch produces a short list, and we say so. Volume is real incorporation activity, not a quota.
- No recycled data. Your Monday list is built from that week's register activity — leads are at most days old, not weeks.
Judge it yourself
The free sample exists so you can mark our homework before paying anything: one email to hello@incorpalert.co.uk with your business type and area, and you'll get this week's list for your patch, evidence links included.