Business Entity Search & Company Registry Lookup

Search companies by legal name or registration number and get structured, registry-backed business information for KYB, KYC, vendor due diligence, compliance, procurement, CRM enrichment, and sales research.

Business Entity Search is designed for people searching for:

• company registry lookup
• business verification
• legal entity verification
• company registration number lookup
• directors and officers
• company status and registered address
• filing history, charges, and ownership
• cross-border business due diligence

Why use this Actor?

A company name alone is often not enough to make a decision. This Actor turns registry searches into consistent records that can be reviewed by a person or passed into an automated workflow.

Use it to:

• Verify that a legal entity exists and confirm its registration number.
• Check whether a company is active, dissolved, or in another registry status.
• Retrieve registered address, company type, incorporation date, industry codes, officers, filings, charges, and persons with significant control where the registry provides them.
• Support KYB/KYC onboarding, vendor and supplier checks, compliance reviews, audit preparation, and account enrichment.
• Keep an evidence trail with the registry source, jurisdiction, match method, candidate matches, and diagnostics.
• Run optional SEC cross-linking and OFAC SDN sanctions screening when those checks are enabled.

Simple mode: one company search

For a single lookup, provide either:

• entityName: a legal or trading name, such as Tesco PLC
• registrationNumber: an exact company number when you already have one

Choose one or more countryCodes and run the Actor. For the most precise verification, use a registration number. Name searches can return several candidates so that your workflow can review the match instead of accepting an unsafe guess.

Example:

{
  "entityName": "Tesco PLC",
  "countryCodes": ["GB"],
  "fetchOfficers": true,
  "includeFilings": true
}

Batch and recurring searches

Use searchQueries for a list of company names. The Actor returns normalized records for each query and each selected source.

You can use this for:

• supplier and customer portfolio checks
• onboarding queues
• CRM enrichment
• bulk company-number verification
• recurring monitoring of a list of businesses

Apify Schedules can run the same input repeatedly, while webhooks or downstream integrations can deliver each completed dataset to your workflow. Set maxResults to control the number of candidates returned per registry search.

Example:

{
  "searchQueries": ["Tesco PLC", "Shopify", "Acme Holdings"],
  "countryCodes": ["GB", "US", "AU", "CA"],
  "maxResults": 10
}

Supported coverage

• United Kingdom: Companies House.
• United States: Florida (FL), New York (NY), Pennsylvania (PA), Oregon (OR), Colorado (CO), Connecticut (CT), and Hawaii (HI).
• Australia: national ASIC / ABR source, with state information when published.
• Canada: national Canadian registry source, with province information when published.

Every record includes the source and jurisdiction used. Known jurisdictions without an implemented official adapter are returned as Unsupported with diagnostics instead of being sent to the wrong registry.

Search filters and controls

Use these inputs to narrow results and control payload size:

• registrySources — limit searches to selected sources.
• statuses — keep statuses such as Active or Dissolved.
• city and postalCode — filter by published location.
• entityTypeContains — filter by company type or related text.
• registeredAfter — keep entities registered on or after an ISO date.
• fetchOfficers, includeFilings, includeCharges, and includePsc — choose related data.
• includeSearchMatches — keep candidate matches for auditability.
• includeSecCrossLink — return a matching SEC CIK, ticker, and title when available.
• screenSanctions and sanctionsMinScore — screen names against the official OFAC SDN data and return clear, potential-match, or unavailable states.

What the output contains

Each normalized result can include:

• legal name and registration number
• country, state or province, jurisdiction, and registry source
• status, entity type, incorporation date, and registered address
• directors, officers, and other people supplied by the registry
• filing history, charges, mortgages, and PSC data where available
• industry or SIC classifications
• candidate matches and deterministic match details
• source URLs, timing metrics, retry information, and registry diagnostics
• optional SEC and OFAC screening results

The output is suitable for a dataset, API pipeline, CRM enrichment job, compliance case, or human review queue.

Feature comparison

Capability	Business Entity Search	Single-registry lookup	State or province-focused scraper
Cross-border search	UK, selected US states, Australia, and Canada	Usually one registry	Usually one state or province group
Search by company name	Yes	Usually	Usually
Search by registration number	Yes	Often	Often
Batch company searches	Yes, with searchQueries	Varies	Varies
Status, location, type, and date filters	Yes	Varies	Varies
Normalized output across sources	Yes	Usually source-specific	Usually source-specific
Registry provenance and diagnostics	Yes	Varies	Varies
Officers, filings, charges, and PSC	Returned where the source provides them	Varies	Varies
SEC cross-link	Optional	Rare	Rare
OFAC SDN screening	Optional	Rare	Rare
Recurring monitoring	Run with an Apify Schedule	Varies	Varies

Current pricing

The live Actor pricing is:

• $0.002 per returned result
• $0.0005 per run start

The result charge is based on records written to the default dataset. A run can therefore cost more when it searches several countries or returns several candidates.

Workload	Result charge	Run-start charge	Estimated total
1 result in one run	$0.0020	$0.0005	$0.0025
10 results in one run	$0.0200	$0.0005	$0.0205
100 results in one run	$0.2000	$0.0005	$0.2005
1,000 results in one run	$2.0000	$0.0005	$2.0005

Use (returned results × $0.002) + $0.0005 as the quick estimate. Apify compute, storage, proxy, and external service charges may also appear on the account separately.

For this Actor’s multi-source lookups, SEC cross-linking, sanctions screening, and registry retries, the current $0.002 result price is commercially conservative. A future price review should consider moving the result charge toward $0.005 once conversion and repeat usage support it. The current public price remains unchanged in this release.

Reliability and matching behavior

• Exact registration-number searches are preferred when available.
• Name searches preserve candidate matches instead of silently choosing between similar companies.
• Registry requests use bounded retries for transient HTTP failures.
• Unsupported or blocked sources return an explicit diagnostic and source information.
• A registry error is different from Not Found: an error means the source could not be completed, while Not Found means the search completed without a matching entity.

Frequently asked questions

Can I search several countries at once?

Yes. Put multiple ISO country codes in countryCodes, such as ["GB", "US", "AU", "CA"].

How do I verify one exact company?

Use registrationNumber and the matching country or jurisdiction. This avoids ambiguity from similarly named companies.

Can I run this every week or every day?

Yes. Create an Apify Schedule with the same input, or submit a batch through searchQueries and process the resulting dataset in your workflow.

What happens when a jurisdiction is not supported?

The Actor returns an Unsupported result with the requested jurisdiction, official source information, and an access note. It does not substitute a different registry.

Is this a sanctions decision?

No. OFAC screening is an optional name-screening signal that reports match confidence and source availability. Your compliance process should review potential matches.

Key changes in this release

• Rewritten Store copy around business entity search, company lookup, KYB, and registry verification search intent.
• Added clear simple-mode and batch/recurring workflows.
• Added a feature comparison table and practical per-run pricing examples.
• Clarified supported jurisdictions, unsupported-source behavior, reliability signals, and optional SEC/OFAC checks.