Questions about the records.

Every release is gated on a blind evaluation corpus before it ships, with zero tolerance for two categories of error: naming the wrong owner, and identifying the wrong company. Those are the two ways a record can be actively harmful rather than merely incomplete.

We take precision over recall. When the engine cannot support a conclusion, it abstains and says so, and the confidence word on a record is the honest ceiling of what that record holds — no part of the screen may claim more certainty than the evidence behind it.

We do not publish a single accuracy figure. One number averaged across a public company, a family business and a co-operative would tell you less than the confidence word on the record in front of you, and it would invite you to trust a record the number was never about.

Public records: corporate registries, regulatory filings, legal-entity identifiers, and companies’ own published documents. Every record lists the sources behind it with the publisher and the date each one was last checked, so you can go and read them yourself.

Nothing is published without an admissible public source attached to it. Language models do the orienting, the planning and the reading — the work a newsroom gives a researcher — but they never supply a fact that no source supports. How it works sets out the whole pipeline.

It means the sources agree, but one link in the chain is less direct or remains an inference. It is a real answer with a stated limit, not a shrug.

There are four words and they describe how well the ownership conclusion is supported, never how our research is going. Confirmed: an appropriate, admissible source names the owner or controller, with no credible contradiction. Likely: sources agree, but one link is less direct. Tracing: research is still running, and the facts already supported stay on screen. Unconfirmed: the sources we could reach do not support naming an owner with enough confidence.

The word is a product guarantee rather than a decoration — a preliminary reading is capped at Likely however good it looks, and nothing on a record may print a stronger word than the record’s own. How ownership is verified goes through each one.

Because tracing a chain properly takes longer than anyone wants to stand in an aisle. A lookup shows its best current reading within seconds and keeps working behind it.

The preliminary is drawn differently on purpose. The chain is stippled rather than engraved, its verdict is capped at Likely, and no part of the screen pretends it has been verified — so you can tell at a glance which links have been checked and which have not. As each link is supported, that segment sets.

If you leave before it finishes, the finished trail lands in your history on this device.

Usually because the disclosure does not exist. Private companies, trusts, co-operatives, joint ventures and public companies are not required to publish the same things, and in many places beneficial ownership is not public at all.

When the evidence runs out, the record names the last supported link and stops there instead of filling the gap. “Ownership isn’t publicly disclosed for this one” is a fact about the world rather than a failure of the lookup, and we would rather hand you that than a confident guess.

A record can also change. When a new filing or a reliable correction appears, the record is revised, and the revision is visible rather than silent.

That no one party holds enough of the company to direct it. That is a finding, not a gap — the chain is complete, and what it found at the top is that there is nobody to point at.

It is the ordinary situation for a widely-held public company, and it happens to private ones too. It is not the same as being Canadian-owned, and a record that says it will not also wear an ownership badge.

Every saved record carries a correct-this-record control, and there is an add or correct form for anything else. A correction is checked against sources like any other claim; it does not overwrite a record on submission.

Records are append-only and bitemporal: we store both when a fact was true in the world and when we learned it. A record therefore cannot silently forget what it said yesterday, and a correction reads as a change rather than as a quiet edit.

No. OwnedBy reports who benefits; it does not tell you what that should mean to you.

The Canadian brands directory lists businesses that sell in the same category as something you looked up. A category match never earns an ownership badge: appearing beside a search is not an endorsement, and the status on each card is the same evidence-graded word used everywhere else in the product.

Ownership is also not the whole story of what a company means to a place. Manufacturing, jobs, identity and community all count, and a foreign-owned plant can carry a town. Where the profit lands is one fact you were owed, not a verdict on what to buy.

There are no accounts and no sign-in, and your lookup history lives in your browser’s local storage rather than on a server. Clearing your browser data deletes it and we have no copy.

An email address is stored only if you ask for a report, and asking also subscribes you to occasional OwnedBy news, with an unsubscribe link on every message. There are no advertising pixels, no session replay and no cross-site tracking; aggregate web analytics is the only analytics client in the app. The full account is on the privacy page.

Not yet. A public API — the same records, the same provenance, available programmatically — is where this is going, and we are not putting a date on it.

If you are building something that rests on ownership transparency, that is what we want to make possible.

Pas encore — on y travaille. The French copy is written and ships in the app; it stays switched off until it has had a review pass of its own, because a half-reviewed second language is worse than one language shipped honestly.

A Canadian living abroad, who kept noticing that the conversation about trade runs on feelings and flags while the material facts — who owns what, where the profit finally lands — are out of reach of the person standing at the shelf.

The longer version is the founder’s note on How it works.