How the score works, and how well

Salenovo ranks newly incorporated companies by how likely they are to become real trading businesses, classifies what they are, and verifies websites and premises. This page says exactly how each part is built, what it was tested on, what the results were, what is deliberately left out, and what it cannot do. In the week of the latest index, 14,543 companies were incorporated in the UK. Every number below is from a held-out test unless it says otherwise.

What happens to new companies

"Real" here means active on the register with non-dormant accounts filed. To measure it without the usual blind spot — Companies House's bulk file only lists companies that still exist — every company incorporated in two whole months (March 2022 and March 2024) was traced through the register's advanced search, dissolved companies included, and six quarterly cohorts were compared with the official incorporation statistics.

About a third of incorporations become trading companies; more than half are gone within two and a half years. Among the companies that dissolve, roughly one in seven traded first — real businesses that closed; the rest never traded. A further 18% of the survivors carry property, holding-company or residents'-management SIC codes: they file accounts, so they count as "trading", but they are not customers for most people who buy new-company data. That is why there is a classification layer as well as a score.

How the score is built

The score uses only information that exists on the day a company is formed or arrives in its first weeks, all of it from free public sources: the Companies House register (company type, SIC codes, the registered address and what else is registered there, how many directors were appointed at incorporation and how long the most experienced of them has been a UK director, whether any director has a string of dissolved companies behind them, whether a person with significant control was notified), a curated table of the 500 largest formation addresses with the historical outcomes of companies formed there, whether the company's name resolves as a .co.uk, .com or .uk domain, and whether it appears on the ICO's register of data-protection fee payers. The model is a blend of a logistic regression on 18 curated features and a small gradient-boosted model, trained on 20,000 companies from the 2022–23 cohorts and tested on 10,000 from 2024 — a genuine time-based test across a cohort shift, not a random split.

What is deliberately excluded

The two strongest single predictors in the data are the age of the youngest director and whether any director is UK-resident. They are not used. Age is a protected characteristic and residency and nationality are proxies for one; a commercial lead product that marked companies down for them would be unfair and a legal risk. Leaving them out costs about 0.01 of AUC. Director names, dates of birth and home addresses are never used as features, stored in the product or shown to customers.

How well it works

AUC is the standard measure of a ranker: 0.5 is a coin toss, 1.0 is perfect. The columns on the right are what a buyer actually sees — how real the top of the list is, and how empty the bottom is — against a base rate of 37.5% real in the test cohort.

The ICO row is the best number on this page and the least useful one in practice. Only about 19% of companies that become real ever appear on the ICO register at all; the median registration comes 247 days after incorporation, and fewer than 2% are on it within 90 days. A company in this week's list is therefore ranked by the row above it — AUC 0.716 — and that is the model the bands below are built from.

The bands customers see are quintiles of the score. On the held-out 2024 companies, with the fair feature set plus channel and domain:

Leaving one cohort month out at a time and testing on it gives AUCs of 0.73 to 0.76 for every settled month — no seasonal or vintage fragility. Companies House filings in the first six months add almost nothing (day 0 0.716 → day 180 0.727), because three-quarters of new companies file nothing at all in that time; the score sharpens over the first year as external signals arrive, not from the register. The production scorer, which also uses the ICO signal and is refit on all 30,000, shows in-sample bands running from 7% (E) to 70% (A); the held-out figures above are the ones to quote.

What this means in plain terms. The score is a good ranker and a poor oracle. A band-A company is about 1.6 times as likely to trade as a random incorporation — six in ten against under four in ten — and a band-E company is about a quarter as likely; the bottom third of a raw feed can be dropped at a small cost in missed businesses. It is not a confident yes-or-no label for any individual company, and it is presented as a band, not a verdict.

The signals, on 30,000 companies

Two things stand out. Companies formed through an accountant or a mid-sized agent are nearly twice as likely to become real as companies registered at a home address — and that same signal is how we flag "already has an accountant". Director experience matters in both directions. Vague or generic SIC codes, which a third of new companies carry, tell you almost nothing about whether the company is real; they cost you what it does, not whether it exists.

The ICO figure needs a caveat: the ICO publishes only current fee payers, so companies that registered and later dissolved have vanished from it, and the 88% is inflated. Salenovo has downloaded the register daily since 9 September 2026 and dates every registration it first sees, which removes that bias for everything from then on.

Classification: what the company is

Alongside the score, each company is classified as an operating business, a property vehicle, a holding or investment company, a dormant or shelf company, or a non-profit, and given a sector, from its name, SIC codes, formation channel and director history. Two independent classifiers are run — a rule set and a language model — and compared: they agree on entity type for 96% of companies and on sector for 85%. Where they disagree the company is marked for review rather than given either answer.

Verified websites and contacts

For every company with a distinctive name we check whether the name resolves as a .co.uk, .com or .uk domain. Resolving sites are fetched (homepage, contact page and a terms or privacy page, respecting robots.txt) and judged against the company: most name-matching domains turn out to be parked pages, placeholders, or an older business with a similar name, and those are excluded. A site is marked confirmed when the company's own registered number appears on it; verified when a model judges it the same business from name, location and content, with a conservative rule that a low-confidence or different-host match is only "possible" and is not shown. Only generic mailboxes (info@, hello@, enquiries@ and the like) shown on the company's own site are kept; a mailbox's domain is checked for a mail exchanger; personal mailboxes are never kept. In the Essex pilot, 498 of 6,938 companies formed since June 2026 (7.2%) had a verified live site when checked; the share rises as companies age, so every company is re-checked at 30, 90 and 180 days. Each row carries the page it was verified from and the date.

Registered food premises

Every food business must register with its local authority before trading, and the Food Standards Agency publishes those registrations daily with name, address, business type and inspection status. We match them to new companies by name and postcode at three levels of strictness — same postcode with agreeing names; same postcode district with identical or very close names; same postcode area only for distinctive names unique in that area — with a list of generic words (café, kitchen, spice, express…) that stops "The Coffee Shop" matching anything beyond its own postcode. A match is shown with the premises address, the FSA's rating or "awaiting inspection", the rating date and the date of the FSA extract, as the FSA's terms require.

Geography and the public pages

Postcodes are mapped to local authorities, regions and travel-to-work areas with the ONS Postcode Directory. The expected-to-trade figure on the public Formation Index pages is not the paid score: it is a transparent estimate in which each company takes the historical trading rate of its mass-formation address (where that address has 100 or more companies in the outcome cohorts) or otherwise of its SIC section, summed over the area. Year-earlier comparisons on those pages count companies incorporated then and still on the register, because that is all the current register can show; they are biased down by dissolutions and are labelled as such. From June 2027 every area has a clean 52-week baseline from our own daily collection, which has recorded every UK incorporation since 1 June 2026.

Running accuracy

The tests above are on companies formed in 2022–24 whose outcomes are known. The real test is what happens to the companies we score from now on, and that takes time to know: strike-offs become visible from about 15 months, first accounts fall due at about 21 months. Each scored month will be reported here as it matures, as the share of companies in each band that has traded, dissolved or stayed dormant.

Limitations

Registered offices, SIC codes and the status of directors' other companies in the training data are today's values, not day-zero values, which slightly flatters the backtest; the daily collection fixes this for everything incorporated from June 2026. "Real" is defined from the register, so a micro-entity property company counts as real and a thriving sole trader who dissolved the company to go self-employed does not. Officer histories were capped at three directors and fifty appointments each. The most recent test cohort still has about 5% of companies whose first accounts are not yet due, counted as not real. Four days in mid-June 2026 returned no incorporations from Companies House's advanced search, an upstream gap, and are marked on the charts. AUCs on samples of this size carry roughly ±0.02 of uncertainty.

Sources and licences

Companies House public register — bulk data, REST API and advanced search (Open Government Licence v3). GOV.UK official incorporation statistics. ONS Postcode Directory (OGL). Information Commissioner's Office register of fee payers (OGL). Food Standards Agency Food Hygiene Rating Scheme open data (OGL; ratings shown with their date). Companies' own public websites, fetched in accordance with their robots.txt with an identified user-agent. No data is bought from brokers and no personal data beyond the public register is collected. Questions about the method, or corrections: hello@salenovo.com.