Business evidence methodology

What we measure

Registered-enterprise counts and sector mix at local authority district (LAD) level; the published all-industry total is the official Nomis UK Business Counts total cell, not the sum of rounded SIC sections; resident population and year-on-year change; enterprise density (enterprises per 1,000 residents) when total and population vintages are compatible; observed UK macro and activity series where loaded in a validated bundle; Companies House register identity, filing calendar and mapped public accounts facts for company-name or company-number search; frozen property families (HMLR Price Paid, UK HPI, VOA stock, MHCLG planning) for property search; user facts and assumptions in decision cases.

What we do not measure

Customer demand, footfall, commercial asking rent, trading revenue, personal success probability, street-level competition beyond descriptive map layers, or a property valuation / yield. Crime, news and venue counts do not enter decision scores. Address-level Price Paid is not shown.

Evidence types

Every displayed value is one of: user fact, user assumption, unverified evidence, observed benchmark, model estimate, or derived calculation, with type, unit, period, source and geography where applicable.

Geography

City evidence profiles use LAD boundaries. Custom searches may use radius context around a point; district counts do not imply street-level conditions. Property families are local-authority aggregates. Price Paid and VOA in the current pack cover England and Wales when the freeze still carries the code; other nations stay missing rather than substituting England/Wales figures.

Missing data

Missing stays missing. Low confidence widens a range or abstains; it does not push a score up or down. We do not invent midpoints, zeros or averages.

Live and contextual sources

Companies House is required for the company journey in deployed environments. News, police.uk crime context and OpenStreetMap venues are optional descriptive sources: a temporary provider failure is shown as unavailable and can be retried, never converted into a zero or a positive signal. Chamber guidance and regional publications are links for further investigation, not report evidence. BCC Quarterly Economic Survey values are not ingested in this release.

Refresh and versioning

Public city snapshots are frozen JSON with explicit data years and snapshot dates. Saved reports are immutable. No live rehydration from latest data. Engine and model versions are recorded on runs and exports.

Release gates

Research-only outputs (for example register-survival probabilities) remain withheld from UI, API, exports and rankings until an explicit engine release gate passes.

Change log

• 2026-09-13: Release 1 company-name search, guest previews, optional source behaviour and the BCC guidance-only boundary documented; methodology v1.3.
• 2026-09-08: Property search and ten-year frozen history (HMLR, UK HPI, VOA, MHCLG) documented; methodology v1.3.
• 2026-09-01: Public methodology page published for SEO release.