The data
Where the data comes from
Companies' own websites first; published figures for size where they exist.
1. The companies’ own websites
Everything that describes a company — what it offers, who it sells to, what kind of business it is, where it is based, which technology its site runs on — is read from its public website.
This is what makes Breaknorm different from an industry-code database. A firm registered in 2004 as “other manufacturing” may be a precision machining shop supplying automotive suppliers today. The register will never tell you that. Its homepage does.
We read public pages only. We do not sign up for anything, submit forms or read anything behind a login.
2. Published figures, for size
Where a company’s size has been published, we use it instead of estimating:
- Company registers that publish headcount or revenue.
- Public company profiles, such as LinkedIn company pages, through a data partner.
- Wikidata, for larger organizations.
Each size band says which one it came from (source). Everything else is our estimate, and marked as such
— see estimates.
3. Our classification
Categories, company type, business model and the summaries are ours: models that read the website and describe the company in a consistent way, so that a search in English finds a German, Hungarian or Brazilian company described in its own language.
Because this layer is ours, so are its mistakes — and they are fixable. See a result looks wrong.