About EntitySearch.us

EntitySearch.us publishes guides to searching business entity records in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. This page explains who runs the site, where its information comes from, and how it is checked and corrected.

Who runs this site

EntitySearch.us is owned and operated by Startupsole LLC. The same company maintains the state dataset behind the fees, deadlines and agency details shown on each guide. Company contact details are listed in our Privacy Policy.

Not a government agency

EntitySearch.us is not a government agency, is not affiliated with any state office and is not an official business register. Only the state agency that keeps the register can confirm a record or accept a filing. Every guide links to that agency's official business search.

How a state guide is made

Each guide starts from the state's own sources: the Secretary of State or equivalent agency's business search, its official pages, forms and fee schedules, its filing portal, and the statute where a specific rule needs it. Third-party SEO pages, formation company blogs and search snippets are not used as sources.

The guide walks through the state's search portal step by step, using screenshots that a person captures from that portal and annotates by hand, and ends with a Sources Reviewed list of the official pages it relies on. Research and drafting are done with the help of AI tools, which work under the written sourcing rules described on this page. The critical facts from that research are then reviewed by a person before they are published.

Where the state data comes from

Fees, annual report deadlines, agency contacts, office hours and official search links come from a private dataset covering all 51 jurisdictions. These values are not typed into individual pages. Each release of the site is built from a fixed version of the dataset that has been reviewed before it is published, so a correction made in the dataset reaches every page that shows that fact once the new version is released.

A public preview of the dataset is available on GitHub. It is a sample, not the full dataset: one complete record from each section, with every value listed next to the official page it was read from.

Business application figures on the map come from the U.S. Census Bureau, retrieved through FRED, and are refreshed automatically.

How each fact is checked

• Official publishers only. A source counts as official when it is the government body that publishes the fact: a Secretary of State, a corporations division, a state legislature or code revisor, or the county office that takes the filing. Statutes are preferred for rules; the agency's own fee or how-to page is preferred for costs.
• No commercial sources. Blogs, formation service pages and commercial statute aggregators are not accepted, not even as a second source. Where a state publishes no free official copy of its code, a copy of the statute may be cited only next to an official source for the same fact, and the record says so.
• Every value is traceable. Each change cites the official page it was read from, and that page is opened, not judged from a search result.
• Verification dates are earned. A state record's verification date moves forward only when its sources were actually reopened and its values confirmed. A page that merely loads does not count. That date appears as Last verified in each guide's sidebar.
• No guessing. A value that cannot be confirmed from an official source is left empty or flagged for review rather than estimated.

Rechecks are prioritized by impact: a wrong filing path, a fee with an effective date, a deadline or a temporary office notice comes before a record that is simply older.

Updates and corrections

Changes to state facts are listed on Data Updates, with what changed in each state and, when a recheck found nothing new, a note saying so. That record starts on September 3, 2026. Each guide also shows the date it was last updated.

What the name search does

The name check on each guide is a preliminary lookup run through a third-party service. It is not a search of the state's register, and it does not reserve or approve a name. A reported conflict means the lookup found a matching or similar name. A clear result means that lookup found no match, not that the state will accept the name. Confirm on the official database, which is linked with every result.

How the site makes money

Some links go to business formation services. If you sign up through one of them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. These links are marked as sponsored in the page code, and our rule is that the official state database link stays above them.

Report an error

If something on a guide is wrong, contact us with the page link, what needs fixing and, if you have it, the official page that shows the correct information. A correction is checked against the official source before anything changes.