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An RTIC (Real-Time Industrial Classification) is The Data City’s classification of UK companies into precisely defined sectors and sub-sectors. Standard SIC codes are often too vague, or too out of date, to capture emerging and fast-moving industries — RTICs are built to describe what companies actually do, based on the evidence they publish about themselves.

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How it works

Every RTIC is produced through a rigorous, multi-stage methodology that combines our proprietary AI technology with expert analyst judgement at every step:
  1. Define — the sector is given a rigorous written definition — its scope, its boundaries, and real companies that exemplify it — developed with input from industry and academic experts wherever possible.
  2. Classify — our proprietary AI identifies the companies that genuinely belong in the sector, assessing each against the sector’s definition using the evidence of what that company actually says about itself. Our technology draws on a continuously refreshed view of hundreds of thousands of matched UK company websites.
  3. Quality-assure — every list goes through multiple independent layers of AI-assisted quality assurance, designed to catch false positives, recover genuine companies that might otherwise be missed, and sense-check the sector’s overall shape and statistics before anything is published.
  4. Sign off — analysts review the results throughout, and a manager formally signs off every RTIC before publication. No AI output goes live on its own.
These stages run as a continuous loop, not a one-way pipeline: when real companies test a sector’s boundaries, the definition is refined and the affected work re-run — for as long as it takes to get the sector right.
Because classification is grounded in website evidence, a company needs a matched website to be classified into an RTIC. See why not all companies have RTICs.

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Kept current, not built once

Published RTICs don’t stand still. Newly identified UK companies are continuously assessed against every published sector, and an analyst reviews every proposed addition before it joins a live list. Periodic full updates refresh the sector definition and company list together — and each update comes with a report explaining what changed and why, so you can always understand how your list has evolved. Three types of update keep an RTIC current: an annual Full Update, a monthly Maintenance Update, and ad hoc Hotfixes raised from reports on the platform. Each is reflected in the RTIC’s version number. See RTIC update types and versioning.

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What you can rely on

  • Human oversight, always. An analyst reviews, and can override, every AI output. Ambiguous and borderline companies are decided by expert judgement, not by an algorithm alone.
  • Evidence, not guesswork. Classification decisions are grounded in what companies actually publish about themselves. Where evidence can’t be found, a company is flagged for review — never guessed at.
  • Full traceability. Every decision is versioned and auditable: any classification can be traced back to the sector definition and evidence that produced it.
  • Honest accuracy. Where we quote a confidence or accuracy figure, it comes with the reasoning behind it — we show our working, not just a headline number.
A detailed description of our methodology is available on request — email support@thedatacity.com.
Last modified on August 14, 2026