UK Business Trust Check: Verify Any UK Company or Trader

About to book a tradesperson, sign up a supplier, or pay a UK business you found online? UK Business Trust Check tells you whether that business is real and healthy before any money moves: a verdict, a 0 to 100 score, the reasons behind it, and one plain-English line you (or your AI agent) can read out. Everything comes from official UK sources: Companies House, The Gazette, the FCDO UK Sanctions List and the Food Standards Agency.

Check one business, or thousands at once from a CSV, a Google Sheet or another Actor's dataset. Every original column comes back untouched, with the verdict added alongside.

What does UK Business Trust Check do?

For each business you give it (a name, a website, a company number, or any mix):

1. Reads the business's own website (homepage plus the privacy, terms, contact and about pages) for what it says about itself: its company number, its legal name ("Acme Electrical Ltd"), its VAT number, and any trade body badges it shows (NICEIC, NAPIT, Gas Safe, TrustMark, Checkatrade, Which? Trusted Trader, FMB, SafeContractor).
2. Finds the right Companies House record, or says plainly that none can be matched. It uses the number on the site first, then the legal name on the site, then the name plus the area, and it will not guess: a sole trader in one town is never confused with a dissolved limited company of almost the same name in another.
3. Checks the company's health on the register: status, age, overdue accounts or confirmation statement, strike-off in progress, insolvency cases, charges, registered office problems, and (optionally) its directors' track records and disqualification name matches.
4. Searches The Gazette for corporate insolvency notices such as winding-up petitions and liquidations.
5. Screens the UK Sanctions List (the FCDO list, the only official UK list since 28 January 2026) against the business, the company and its current officers and controllers.
6. Checks the food hygiene rating from the FSA when the business looks food-related.
7. Returns a verdict: looks_legitimate, caution, high_risk or cannot_verify, with every reason citing its source and a link.

Who uses it

• Vetting contractors and tradespeople before a deposit: is "ABC Roofing Ltd" actually a live company, or was it struck off last year?
• Supplier and vendor onboarding: screen a whole supplier list against the register and the sanctions list in one run.
• Marketplaces and directories checking sellers or listed trades before they go live.
• Lead lists: clean a Google Maps or directory scrape before outreach, dropping dissolved and insolvent firms.
• AI agents that pay businesses: check a business before an agent books, buys or pays, and read back one sentence to the user.

How to use it

1. Put your businesses in the Businesses list, or point Dataset or File URL at your list (a Google Sheet link works as it is, shared as "Anyone with the link can view").
2. Columns are detected automatically (name, title, website, url, postcode, postalCode, city, company_number and similar). If yours are unusual, set Field mapping.
3. Click Start. Five businesses take about 20 seconds.
4. Read the Verdicts tab, or download as JSON, CSV or Excel.

Input example

{
  "businesses": [
    { "businessName": "Tesco PLC", "companyNumber": "00445790" },
    { "businessName": "Acme Electrical", "website": "acme-electrical.co.uk", "postcode": "LE11 2HP" }
  ],
  "includeOfficers": true
}

Output

One row per business. Real output for Tesco PLC, shortened:

{
  "businessName": "Tesco PLC",
  "trustVerdict": "looks_legitimate",
  "trustScore": 100,
  "plainEnglishSummary": "TESCO PLC (company 00445790) looks legitimate: an active UK company registered 78 years ago, filings up to date, and no insolvency, strike-off or sanctions flags. Matched by the company number supplied, high confidence. This is a public register check, not a credit check or a guarantee of their work.",
  "matchMethod": "number_given",
  "matchConfidence": "high",
  "matchedCompanyNumber": "00445790",
  "matchedCompanyName": "TESCO PLC",
  "companyStatus": "active",
  "incorporatedOn": "1947-11-27",
  "activeDirectorCount": 10,
  "sanctionsChecked": true,
  "sanctionsListDate": "29-Sep-2026",
  "sanctionsHits": [],
  "badgesClaimed": [],
  "badgesVerified": false,
  "reasons": [
    { "severity": "green", "code": "registered-company", "message": "Registered on Companies House as TESCO PLC (00445790), status active, incorporated 1947-11-27 (78 years ago).", "source": "Companies House", "url": "https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/00445790" },
    { "severity": "green", "code": "filings-up-to-date", "message": "Accounts and confirmation statement are not overdue (last accounts made up to 2026-02-28).", "source": "Companies House" }
  ]
}

A company in liquidation reads like this (Carillion, real output):

High risk: do not pay CARILLION PLC (company 03782379) without further checks. Company status is "liquidation". Matched by the company number supplied, high confidence.

And a sole trader with no register entry:

Cannot verify: no Companies House record could be confidently matched, which is normal for sole traders and partnerships but means no official register confirms who they are. Their website claims NAPIT, which was not verified. Ask for their full legal name and trading address, and check any trade scheme on the scheme's own site.

Main fields

Field	What it means
trustVerdict	looks_legitimate, caution, high_risk or cannot_verify
trustScore	0 to 100, for sorting a list. The verdict comes from the reasons, not the score
plainEnglishSummary	One sentence to read back to a person
reasons	Every finding: severity (red, amber, green, info), code, message, source, url
matchMethod	number_given, number_on_site, legal_name_on_site, exact_registered_name, name_and_area or none
matchConfidence	high or medium (no match is never guessed)
matchedCompanyNumber, matchedCompanyName, companyStatus, incorporatedOn, registeredOffice	The register entry it matched
siteCompanyNumbers, siteLegalNames, siteVatNumbers	What the website claims about itself
badgesClaimed	Trade body badges shown on the site. badgesVerified is always false
sanctionsHits	Any UK Sanctions List match, with the list's reference
gazetteNotices	Corporate insolvency notices found in The Gazette
foodHygiene	FSA rating, date and link, for food businesses
candidatesRejected	Register entries it looked at and did not choose, and why
attribution	Source and licence lines for every row

What the verdicts mean. high_risk: a red flag on a confident match (in liquidation, dissolved, strike-off in progress, overdue accounts, a sanctions match). caution: amber points worth checking (very new company, overdue confirmation statement, director with a trail of insolvent companies, VAT number that fails its check digits, a company number on the site that is not on the register). looks_legitimate: a confident match and nothing red or amber. cannot_verify: no confident register match, which is what most sole traders get.

How much does it cost?

Pay per event: $0.05 per business checked (lower on Bronze, Silver and Gold plans), plus a tiny start fee. A business counts as checked when it was resolved and checked, including a confident "no Companies House match" result. Rows with no name, website or number, and rows that failed, are not charged.

• Vetting 20 contractors: about $1.00
• Screening a 500-row supplier list: about $25
• Cleaning a 2,000-row lead list before outreach: about $100

Speed

About 15 to 20 seconds for five businesses. Large lists are paced by the Companies House limit of 600 calls per five minutes (roughly 8 calls per business with director checks on), so expect around 14 businesses a minute on a long list, and allow about 75 minutes for 1,000 (the default run timeout is six hours). Turn off Check directors for a faster, lighter pass.

Sources and licence

• Companies House public data API: company profile, officers, persons with significant control, filing history, charges, insolvency, disqualified officers search.
• The Gazette notice feed: corporate insolvency notices only (codes 2400 to 2499). Personal insolvency is never fetched.
• FCDO UK Sanctions List, downloaded fresh on every run.
• Food Standards Agency food hygiene rating API.

Every row carries these attribution lines: Contains public sector information from Companies House, The Gazette and the FCDO UK Sanctions List, and food hygiene ratings from the Food Standards Agency, all licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Limits, stated honestly

• Sole traders and partnerships cannot be fully verified. They are not on Companies House, so the answer is cannot_verify, which is a statement about the records, not an accusation.
• Badges are claims, not verification. The Actor reports which trade body logos a site shows; it does not check the schemes' own registers. Check membership on the scheme's website before relying on it.
• VAT numbers get a check-digit test only. A number that fails is flagged; one that passes has not been checked with HMRC.
• Sites behind a bot check fall back to the name. The Actor never works around a CAPTCHA or bot check, and honours robots.txt. It then matches by name and area only, and says so.
• Director checks are name-based. A disqualification or sanctions "possible match" on a common name is shown as something to check, never as a finding.
• A register check is not a credit check. It cannot tell you whether a business does good work or pays its bills; it tells you whether it is what it says it is, and whether the official records show trouble.
• It does not guess at "virtual offices", and it does not use review sites, domain WHOIS or any source whose terms forbid this use.

For AI agents

Call it through Apify's MCP server or API and read plainEnglishSummary back to the user; trustVerdict and reasons carry the detail. Pay-per-event pricing works with x402 agent payments. One business per call works well: pass businessName, website or companyNumber.

FAQ

Is this legal? It reads official public registers published under the Open Government Licence, plus the business's own public website, politely. Officer names appear only as part of company data, and only when something about them is flagged.

Why "cannot verify" and not "fake"? Because most UK tradespeople are sole traders with no Companies House entry. The Actor will not call a business fake on the absence of a record.

It matched the wrong company. Please open an issue with the business and the company number you expected; candidatesRejected shows what else it considered.

If this check saved you from a bad payment or a wasted afternoon, a review on the Actor page helps a lot. Questions and requests go in the Issues tab.