A registered company behind the site
R7.3Does an authoritative register confirm the seller's legal entity?
- Why it matters
- AI agents can confirm they are dealing with a real, registered business.
- What Lens looks for
- We checked whether a public register confirms an identifier your site publishes, such as an LEI or an EU VAT number.
- Where it sits
- Seller · Check 2 of 3
- Needed for
- No stage needs it. It counts toward its group.
- Builds on
- Your legal name, machine-readable R7.2
- Needed by
- Verified by an independent party R7.4
- Usually fixed by
- Legal · Weeks to months
What to do
Publish legalName and a register identifier (an LEI, an EU VAT number, a CIK, a UK company number or an ABN) in schema.org/Organization, writing the name as the register does.
Seller
Who is selling?
The definition
- Definition
- A register identifier is any of R7.2's, on a published organization (R7.2). The registers step looks each identifier up where a free public register API exists: an LEI (leiCode, an iso6523Code under ICD 0199, or an identifier of type LEI) in GLEIF's API; an EU or Northern Ireland VAT number (vatID, a taxID written with its member-state prefix, or an identifier of type VAT) in the European Commission's VIES; a US filer's Central Index Key (an identifier of type CIK) in SEC EDGAR's submissions API; and, where the deployment holds their credentials, a UK company number in Companies House's API and an Australian Business Number in ABN Lookup. A credential is redacted in the recorded exchange. Legal names are compared under deterministic normalization: Unicode compatibility form with diacritics removed, the letters ß, ł, ø, æ, œ, đ, ð, þ, ı and ħ written out (ß as ss), case, & as and, full stops and apostrophes removed, every other run of punctuation and whitespace as one space, a leading The removed, and each legal form in lists.legalForms written as its abbreviation.
- Passes when
- At least one published identifier is confirmed by its register: for an LEI, GLEIF's record with registration status ISSUED; for a VAT number, VIES reports it valid; for a CIK, SEC EDGAR holds the filer; for a UK company number, Companies House lists it active; for an ABN, ABN Lookup lists it Active. And the register's name (for GLEIF, the legal name or a legal name in another language or transliteration; for VIES, the registered name; for SEC EDGAR, the filer's current name; for Companies House, the company name; for ABN Lookup, the entity name) equals the published legalName (or name) under the normalisation. No looser match is made. An identifier with no free public register lookup in this version (duns, a globalLocationNumber, an iso6523Code under another ICD, a taxID or VAT number outside VIES), a register whose credential the deployment does not hold, or a register that discloses no name, is not tested; a register that cannot be reached is inconclusive. The best result over the published identifiers counts: met, then inconclusive, then not tested, then not met.
- Decided by
- A rule
- Evidence
- The home page or agent document naming the organisation; the register's response
- Steps
- home, wellknown, product, terms, registers
- Made as
- anon, lens
- Standards
- ISO 17442 (LEI)schema.org OrganizationEU VIES (VAT)SEC EDGAR APIsCompanies House Public Data APIABN Lookup web services