UK Competition Case MCP Server

Answer "is there a UK competition case touching these companies or this market" from the Competition and Markets Authority's case register, live.

Built for deal and legal teams.

The guardrail is the product

An open Competition Act or cartel case is an INVESTIGATION, not a finding. Saying otherwise about a named company is not a data-quality slip — it is a false statement about identified parties. Three rules, each enforced by a test:

1. A finding is never inferred. finding_status comes from an explicit map of the 27 outcome slugs the register actually contains, enumerated by walking all 2,572 cases. An outcome this build has not seen reports as no-finding-recorded-unmapped-outcome — never a guess.

2. No party name is ever extracted from an investigation title. Merger titles are structured (Sky / ITV merger inquiry) and naming the parties to a merger implies nothing bad about them, so parties are extracted there. For Competition Act and civil cartels, criminal cartels, director disqualification and consumer enforcement, the title is carried verbatim and parties is empty by construction.

3. A criminal-cartels verdict is not a conviction. A verdict can be an acquittal and the register does not say which way it went — it reports as verdict-recorded-direction-not-in-feed. The same care applies to commitments (accepted with no admission of liability) and administrative closures (the CMA closed on resource grounds, having found nothing).

Only four of the 27 outcomes state anything adverse about a party, and each is a published finding: Chapter I infringement, Chapter II infringement, a disqualification order granted, and a consumer-law court order.

Two things measured live that a naive read gets wrong

1. An unrecognised filter value returns zero cases, not an error

filter_case_type=not-a-real-type              -> HTTP 200, total 0
filter_market_sector=energy-and-environment   -> HTTP 200, total 0   (an invented slug)
filter_market_sector=distribution-and-service-industries -> total 256

A typo therefore answers "no competition case touches your market" — the worst possible wrong answer for a deal team. Every value is validated against the enumerated vocabulary before any query is sent, and the refusal explains why.

The vocabularies were enumerated by walking all 2,572 cases on 2026-07-30, not read off documentation: 12 case types, 33 market sectors, 2 states, 27 outcomes.

And the filters are real — proven control vs test against that independent walk: no filter 2,572; case_type=mergers 1,991; case_state=open 71; a real sector 256; an invented one 0.

2. The company search is free text, not a party index

Measured: q=Paramount returns three cases — the live Paramount / Warner Bros. Discovery merger inquiry, an unrelated 2006 NTL / Virgin Mobile merger, and a pay-TV market investigation. The API matches document text, so a hit need not name the company as a party. Every row reports whether your query is visible in its title, and every search reports the ratio.

Tools

tool	what it answers
find_cases	Cases matching a company, term, family, state or market sector
open_cases	Every case currently open — 71 of 2,572 — optionally narrowed
market_case_profile	How much competition activity touches one sector: all-time and open totals plus recent cases
list_market_sectors	The 33 real sector values, enumerated from the full walk
explain_limits	The guardrail in full, the two traps, and every vocabulary. Read before acting.

Scope

The CMA case register only — 2,572 cases as of 2026-07-30, 71 open. Mergers, Competition Act and cartel investigations, market studies, consumer enforcement, subsidy referrals, digital markets, regulatory appeals.

Not covered: the sector regulators with concurrent competition powers (Ofcom, Ofgem, the FCA and the rest) publish separately, and neither is the Competition Appeal Tribunal. A "no cases" answer means the CMA register is silent — not that no UK competition matter exists.

gov.uk/robots.txt disallows /search/all* and /*/print$, and sets a Crawl-delay: 10 for AhrefsBot only. The /api/search.json path is not disallowed and no crawl-delay applies to us — every call is paced at 2 requests/second anyway.

This server reports what the CMA publishes. It states no view on whether any party did anything wrong, and it is not legal advice.

Pricing

Event	Price
Server start (apify-actor-start)	$0.05, charged once per server run by the platform
Tool call (mcp-tool-call)	$0.05 flat per completed tool call

No other events. Memory is pinned to 1024 MB so the start fee is charged once — on this platform the start event bills once per gigabyte.

Errors and notices are not charged. An unrecognised case type, state or market sector, an unfiltered request, or a gov.uk read failure returns without billing.

A sourced "no CMA case matches" IS charged — that is the answer a deal team is paying for.

If a tool call cannot be billed correctly, the call fails rather than serving free.