What are linked companies?
Linked companies data is an extension of our group structure data.
Sets of companies can form “groups” that are connected, but are registered as separate companies for financial, legal and organisational reasons.
Group structure data explains how the sets of companies are connected, the structure of their connections, and the directors that connect them. Creditsafe uses a rules-based criteria to identify companies that form these groups.
However, sometimes companies can be “linked” together, but are not marked as being part of the same group structure by Creditsafe because they do not meet their criteria.
By eye, we can see that these companies are linked in some way; usually it is because they have similar (or identical) company names, websites, directors, shareholders, registered addresses, or SIC codes and more.
Here is an example. The company A Shade Greener Limited is not part of a group structure. It is its own ultimate parent company.
Our linked companies tab shows that there are in fact 63 companies linked to A Shade Greener Limited. All of these share the same postcode, and many have similar names.
For example, A Shade Greener Member LLP. Both companies are registered at the same address STERLING HOUSE MAPLE COURT, MAPLE ROAD, S75 3DP and have the same person of significant control Mr Stewart James Davies born in 1951.
We think these companies are likely to be part of the same organisation, even though our group structure data does not show this link.
When these type of companies are not considered to be in a group structure, we can end up “double-counting” companies that are effectively one economic unit. This can make economic analysis more challenging by inflating the figures.
How do we identify Linked Companies?
We use a machine learning model trained on hundreds of thousands of data points to estimate the probability that any two companies are linked. We consider companies to be linked if they exceed 97% probability.
The data behind this model includes
- company names
- company addresses
- company websites
- director names
- director addresses
- director birthdates
- persons of significant control (shareholders)
and more. These data points are used to find potential links. We then train our model by providing it pairs of companies that are extremely likely to be linked.
Where can I find Linked Companies data?
You can see a company’s linked companies by clicking on the “Linked Companies” tab on a company page.
We currently have around 460k “clusters” or “groups” of linked companies, which contain approximately 1.5million companies in total.
As of Industry Engine v6.1, this data is released under “beta” version status, which means it could contain some errors. We are actively working to keep improving this data.
How we’re using Linked Companies data
When counting companies in a sector, multiple registered companies can represent the same economic entity, for example, if they share a director, location, or website. Linked Companies identifies these relationships.
Distinct Brands already aimed to solve this by counting the likely unique economic entities rather than raw company counts. It’s now powered by Linked Companies data: where a group of linked companies exists, only the earliest-incorporated one counts as a Distinct Brand.
This makes Distinct Brands a more accurate measure of the true number of independent companies in your analysis.
Last modified on June 1, 2026
