Official Company Registry Search (multi-country)

Search seven official government company registers in one query and get back one consistent set of fields, whichever country the company is in. Every record links to the official register entry it came from, so any value can be checked at the source in one click.

Currently covers:

Register	Coverage	Authority
Companies House	United Kingdom	UK registrar of companies
GLEIF	Worldwide	Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation
Brønnøysund	Norway	Norwegian government register of legal entities
INSEE Sirene	France	French national business register
PRH / YTJ	Finland	Finnish Patent and Registration Office
ARES	Czechia	Czech Ministry of Finance
RPO	Slovakia	Statistical Office of the Slovak Republic

What this answers that the official sources cannot

Each national register can only answer about its own country, and each returns a different shape of data in a different language. There is no official endpoint anywhere that answers "find every company called Equinor, in any country, with one query and one schema". That question is structurally impossible for any single register, which is exactly why this tool exists rather than rebuilding a government website.

Concretely, it is useful when you need to:

• Check whether a supplier or counterparty exists, and is still active, across several countries at once
• Match a company to its global LEI so records from different systems line up
• Pull a country's register into a spreadsheet without writing three different API clients

Output

One record per company, identical fields from every register:

Field	Meaning
legal_name	Registered legal name
company_number	Official number: organisation number, SIREN, or LEI
source, source_country	Which register this came from
status	active, inactive, dissolved, or unknown
legal_form	Registered legal form code
incorporated_date, dissolved_date	ISO dates
address_city, address_postcode, address_country	Registered address, at city level
activity_code, activity_text	Industry classification
employees_band	Employee count or band, as the register reports it
lei	Global LEI, where the register provides one
previous_names	Former registered names
last_updated	When the register last changed the record
verify_url	Link to the official register entry

Statuses are normalised to four values. Registers use dozens of local status words between them, and someone comparing three countries needs three buckets, not forty untranslated ones.

Worked example

Input {"query": "Equinor", "limit": 50} returns records like:

{
 "legal_name": "EQUINOR ASA",
 "company_number": "923609016",
 "source": "brreg",
 "source_country": "NO",
 "status": "active",
 "legal_form": "ASA",
 "incorporated_date": "1995-03-12",
 "address_city": "STAVANGER",
 "address_postcode": "4035",
 "activity_code": "06.100",
 "activity_text": "Utvinning av råolje",
 "previous_names": ["Den norske stats oljeselskap a.s", "STATOIL ASA", "STATOILHYDRO ASA"],
 "verify_url": "https://virksomhet.brreg.no/nb/oppslag/enheter/923609016"
}

Open the verify_url and the Norwegian register shows the same name, form and address. You never have to take this tool's word for anything.

Input

Field	Meaning
query	Company name to search for. Required.
countries	Which registers to search. GB (or UK), NO, FR, FI, CZ, SK, or GLOBAL for GLEIF. Leave empty for all of them.
limit	Total companies to return, shared across the selected registers. 1 to 2000.
companies_house_key	Optional. Your own free Companies House key, if you want the UK register searched under your own allowance.

When you need your own Companies House key

You don't, for normal use. The UK register works out of the box.

Companies House allows 600 requests every 5 minutes per key, counted per key rather than per user. The built-in key is shared by everyone using this Actor, so if you are pulling UK data heavily you may hit that ceiling because of other people's runs, and they because of yours.

A key is free from developer.company-information.service.gov.uk. Supply it in companies_house_key and the UK searches run on your own allowance, under your own registration. It is stored encrypted by Apify and never appears in run logs.

Licensing and attribution

All data comes from official APIs published under open licences that permit commercial re-use:

• GLEIF data is licensed under CC0 1.0 Universal
• Norwegian data contains information from the Brønnøysund Register Centre, licensed under NLOD 2.0
• French data comes from INSEE Sirene, licensed under Licence Ouverte 2.0
• UK data contains public sector information from Companies House, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0
• Finnish data comes from the Finnish Patent and Registration Office (PRH) and the Finnish Tax Administration, licensed under CC BY 4.0
• Czech data comes from ARES, Czech Ministry of Finance, published as open data under CC0
• Slovak data comes from the Register of Legal Persons, Statistical Office of the Slovak Republic, licensed under CC BY 4.0

Each run writes the required attribution to its log.

What it does not collect

No personal data. The French register returns company directors' names and dates of birth, and the Norwegian register returns telephone numbers. None of it is collected. This tool describes companies, not the people behind them.

Slovakia needed more than restraint. Its register merges the commercial register with the trade licensing register, and the second is almost entirely sole traders: a search for a common surname comes back four-fifths private individuals, at their home addresses. Only the commercial register is searched, and because Slovak law also allows a natural person to be entered in the commercial register, every Slovak record is checked against its legal form before it is returned. Individuals are dropped. You will only ever see companies.

Reliability

If a register changes the shape of its response, the run fails with a message naming which register and why. It will not return an empty result that looks like "no such company". Values are checked against each register's own detail endpoint, and French records are cross-checked against GLEIF, which is a separate authority. Slovak records are cross-checked against the Ministry of Justice's commercial register, which is a different institution from the Statistical Office that publishes the data.