Data sources
Where the information on this site comes from, how we record it, and what each source type is and is not good for.
How each field is recorded
Every factual field on a company profile is stored with four things attached:
- A source URL — the page the value came from, linkable from the profile.
- An evidence excerpt — a short quotation of the relevant text from that page.
- A retrieval date — when we read it.
- A confidence level — High, Medium or Low, reflecting how direct and reliable the source is.
Fields without any source are not stored as guesses. They are shown on the profile as “Not publicly disclosed” and are excluded from scoring.
Official company website
OFFICIAL_WEBSITEThe manufacturer's own website. The highest-quality source for business type, product range, stated certifications and contact channels. Still self-reported — a company describing itself is not independent confirmation.
B2B platform page
B2B_PLATFORMPublic showroom and company profile pages on platforms such as Made-in-China.com or Alibaba. Useful for company name, stated employee counts, factory area fields and listed markets. These fields are self-reported by the supplier and are not verified by the platform.
Company registry
COMPANY_REGISTRYPublic business registration information. Used where available to confirm legal name and registration status. Not all data points are publicly accessible.
Certification body
CERTIFICATION_BODYPublic information from certifying or testing organisations, where a certificate number can be checked. This is the strongest source for certification data.
Industry directory
INDUSTRY_DIRECTORYEstablished trade directories and industry listings. Used mainly for discovery and cross-checking, rarely as a primary source.
News and trade press
NEWS_ARTICLEPublished articles referencing a company, sometimes useful for project references or expansion news.
What we do not use
- Estimated traffic or revenue figures. Third-party traffic estimates for small manufacturer websites are unreliable, and presenting them as business facts would mislead. We do not publish them.
- Aggregated platform counts presented as company facts. A platform's category supplier count is not evidence about an individual company.
- Personal contact information. We list publicly published business channels only.
- Photographs without a stated licence. Images sourced from third-party platforms are not assumed to be licensed for reuse on this site. Where we cannot establish licence status, we do not display the image.
Crawling and robots
Our data collection respects robots.txt directives, published terms of use, and rate limits. We do not bypass authentication, access controls or technical restrictions.
Corrections
If a source we used was wrong, or the underlying page has changed, tell us via Report an error. Corrections are applied to the stored data with an audit record.