Methodology

How the gate works

1. Registered in Scotland

A company is in this index when the register gives it a Scottish company number, which is what the registrar issues for a Scottish registration. A company that moved its registration to England is not in the index, whatever its name says.

Where a Scottish-sounding name turns out to be registered elsewhere, the results say so in one quiet line at the foot. Those records are never mixed into the results, because a search here is a search of Scotland.

Where a company registered in Scotland is controlled from outside Scotland, the record carries a control flag and the name of the controller. That is the case a Scottish registration alone would hide.

2. The outward postcode

Registered offices are checked against the sixteen Scottish postcode areas, compared on the area exactly so that G means Glasgow and never Guildford.

Checked at ingest. This snapshot holds 238 records with a Scottish company number and a registered office outside those areas: 0.07 per cent, reported rather than hidden. The company number remains the statutory marker, so they stay in the index.

The same applies to Scottish partnerships, which are Scottish however far from Scotland the partners themselves sit: a number issued under Scots law is the marker, and the registered office is quoted wherever it is.

3. Nominee addresses and mail drops

Every record carries the number of companies registered at the same address, counted from the register itself. An address used by 25 or more companies is marked shared address. An address used by 100 or more is marked virtual / mail-drop registered, and it is never treated as a local business address.

In this snapshot that is 765 addresses holding 85,202 companies, among them 5 South Charlotte Street in Edinburgh with 4,516 and 272 Bath Street in Glasgow with 1,573. The flag is a count, not an accusation: it says the registered office is an agent's desk rather than premises of the company's own.

The one exception is a real group head office. Where 60 per cent or more of the companies at an address share the same name, the record reads group head office rather than a mail drop, and carries tier 3 rather than tier 2.

A charity has a different register to quote. A Scottish charitable incorporated organisation is not a company. Its CS number is an entry on the Registrar's Index of Company Names, kept so that a name cannot be taken twice, and its regulator is the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator. The company registrar holds no address, no trade and no previous name for that class. The charity register holds all of it, so each SCIO is matched to it by name, and only where exactly one SCIO carries that name is anything added: the Scottish Charity Number the charity itself uses, its principal office, the website it gave the regulator, and whether it is active. Of 7,988, 7,732 were matched; the rest keep a name, a number and a year and nothing else rather than borrow somebody else's address. A charity card links to OSCR, not to Companies House.

Not everything here is a company. A Scottish business, trade, place to stay, band, charity, club or community group with no company number can be listed too, in a block above the company results, and it is called what it is there: submitted, not quoted. The test for it is different, and it is the only test available to something that files no return: a Scottish address, checked by hand before it goes up. Nothing without a company number is ever mixed into the company results, so a record with a number in it is always a record from the register. Every listing with no number sits in the directory, A to Z.

Two classes are charities first and everything else second. The charities class holds 20,913 bodies the Scottish Charity Register lists as active and operating in Scotland, and the places of worship class holds 3,233 of them: the ones whose published purpose is the advancement of religion where the record names a church, a chapel, a mosque, a gurdwara or another place, rather than the central office of a denomination. A place of worship is a place; a charity is a body; neither is a company, and a charity number is not a company number even though both are written SC followed by six digits. That is why their pages carry a prefix - /record/charity_SC045309 and /record/worship_SC020589 - because 1,393 charity numbers are also live company numbers and a bare number would open the wrong record.

Contains information from the Scottish Charity Register supplied by the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator and licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0. © Crown Copyright and database right. Keek is not the Scottish Charity Register and does not claim to be: OSCR keeps the Register, and the OSCR record is the statutory one.

What Keek does not do

It does not sell data, send mail or hold a contact list. Keek is a reading tool for public records: it quotes what a register or a public list has already published, so nothing here is a lead, a mailshot or an outreach service. It carries no advertising either.
It does not rank or score. There is no good and bad here, only what the filings record.
It does not call anyone a shell. The card prints the registered office, the registration and the controller. The reader draws the conclusion.
It does not claim to know ultimate owners. The chain stops where the filings stop, and the card says where it stopped.
It searches registered names, not trading names. Companies House holds the legal name of every company. A shop trading as one thing under a company called another will be found under its registered name.
It does not know a company's website unless a person says so. The register holds no web address for any company. A link to a company's own site appears here only where someone submitted it and it was checked against the record.
Brand to company is editorial. Where Keek has mapped a brand to a company, the card says so. Everything else is quoted.
A listing is not a register entry. A business, place to stay, band, charity or club with no company number is listed only as submitted, on a Scottish address, and it is marked as such. There is no register behind it, so there is nothing to quote and nothing to check it against beyond the address.
It names the first controlling company, not a chosen owner. Where a company has several corporate controllers, the card says there are more than one and names the first the filings give. Where the filings close on themselves in a loop, the walk stops and the card says so rather than picking somebody to break the loop. Where nothing is said at all, the register has filed nothing, and the card says that too.
A public body is not a company. A council or a health board has no company number and no owner to find, so its card does not pretend to have either. It carries the statute that creates it, the address the body publishes for itself and the date that address was read. The code field stays empty until a source for it is in hand. Nothing on that card is inferred.

On your phone

Keek can sit on a phone's home screen beside everything else, and open without the browser's address bar. Nothing comes from an app store and there is nothing to download: it is this same site, one tap from the home screen.

On an iPhone or an iPad, open keek.site in Safari, tap the Share button (the square with an arrow leaving it), choose Add to Home Screen, then Add. Safari never offers this by itself, so it is worth knowing it is there.

On an Android phone, or in Chrome on a computer, Chrome asks rather than waiting to be asked: an Install app or Add to Home screen prompt, or the small install icon at the right-hand end of the address bar.

Sources

These are separate downloads taken on different days, not one snapshot, and each index states the date of its own. The company register bulk file was read on 1 October 2026 and is refreshed whole rather than patched, so it is the older of the two company files. The persons with significant control bulk that answers the control question was read on 24 October 2026. The care services datastore was published on 31 August 2026 and is the oldest source here, and it is the one that moves furthest behind while the next monthly publication is awaited. The food hygiene ratings and the library returns were read on 26 October 2026 and are the newest. The dental practices snapshot is as at 31 March 2026 and was published on 26 May 2026. The school list is the Scottish Government's own, reviewed by it on 31 July 2026. Nothing here is presented as fresher than the day it was read.

Company names, numbers, registered offices, jurisdictions, incorporation dates and persons with significant control are quoted from the Companies House public register, by way of the free company data product and the public data API. Each audit card links to its own filing. That information is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Political party names, registered headquarters, the three statutory officers and accounting units are quoted from the Electoral Commission register of political parties, kept under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000. Each party card links to its own registration. This class holds the parties whose own registration records that they are registered to field candidates in Scotland. That is a field on the registration and not a judgement of ours, and it says nothing about whether a party has ever stood a candidate here, only that it may. A party registered for England and Wales alone is therefore not in this class however well known it is, and the Scottish party of the same colour is, because the Commission registers them as two parties.

Control, for every registration rather than only the featured audits, is read from the Companies House persons with significant control bulk snapshot of 24 October 2026. It is followed upward one company at a time until the filings stop. A Scottish company controlled by a company elsewhere is followed out of Scotland, because stopping at the border would end most chains at a false answer: the Daily Record runs to Reach plc, and the Edinburgh Woollen Mill to Guernsey. Where a controller is a company outside the United Kingdom, its place of registration is the place the filing names.

Councils and health boards are quoted from the Acts that constitute them, with the postal address the body publishes for itself and the date that address was read. A council is constituted by section 2 of the Local Government etc. (Scotland) Act 1994, and a health board by section 2 of the National Health Service (Scotland) Act 1978, both read from legislation.gov.uk. Each body card links to its own statutory basis and to the page its address was read from.

Hospital sites are quoted from Public Health Scotland's national list of current NHS hospitals, with the health board and council area names taken from the official lookup tables published beside it. A hospital is a place rather than a body or a company: it has no company number, no owner to trace and no statute that constitutes it, so the list and its own HospitalCode are the citation. The address is printed exactly as the list gives it and the postcode is normalised to one space. There is no town field on purpose, because the first address line is a street in some records and a place in others. Twenty-three postcodes hold more than one site, which is a hospital campus with a unit beside it, and those are never marked as a shared or mail-drop address. Private hospitals are companies with company numbers and stay in the company index.

Schools are quoted from the Scottish Government's own school contact details workbook, from the open schools worksheet, so a closed school is not carried at all. It holds 2,426 schools. Each record carries the Seed Code the school system itself uses, the local authority, the address and postcode, the departments the list marks, the denomination, the medium of education, whether Gaelic provision is offered, and the phone, email and website the school system publishes. A school is a place like a hospital: no company number and no owner to trace, so it is cited by its Seed Code and the national list. No stage is ever inferred from a school's name.

Court venues are quoted from the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service's own list of court locations: 50 venues, being the sheriff and justice of the peace courts, the Court of Session, the Sheriff Appeal Court, the National Personal Injury Court and the High Court venues. A court is a place, not a company, a public body or a hospital, and no single statute constitutes every one of them. Where a venue page prints more than one address, the first address block the SCTS prints is quoted and the page is linked, so the correspondence address is one click away: Lochgilphead is addressed care of Dunoon Sheriff Court for post, and all mail for Lochmaddy is addressed to Portree Sheriff Court, as the pages state. Tribunals, the SCTS headquarters, the Accountant of Court, the Public Guardian and the Scottish Land Court are deliberately not in this index.

Food businesses are quoted from the Food Standards Agency's ratings open data, read on 26 October 2026: 58,934 establishments taking part in the Food Hygiene Information Scheme, each with its trading name, business type, address, council, the inspection outcome and the date of the inspection. That file carries no phone, no website, no grade and no score, so neither does the record. An inspection outcome is not a registration, and two cards for one business, one a company and one a food business, are two different records rather than one claim.

The search answers the words a reader would type. A field on every company and food business record holds the phrases those facts deserve, so controlled outside scotland, shared address, virtual address, group head office, food hygiene awaiting inspection and food hygiene improvement required find the records that carry them, rather than only the businesses whose names happen to contain the words. Three things that field does not do. It never says a company is run from abroad: the phrase means the controller at the top of the chain is a company registered outside Scotland, and the register records where that company is registered, never where decisions are taken. It never reads an empty field as a clean one: a company where the register gives no controller carries "no psc filed", which is a statement about the filing and not about the company. And "awaiting inspection" is a status the Food Standards Agency publishes, meaning no inspection has been published yet, not a failed rating.

Care services are quoted from the Care Inspectorate's own monthly care services open datastore, published 31 August 2026: 10,359 active services, each cited by its CS number with its service kind, address, council area, health board, provider, registered places, client group, registration date and, where the regulator publishes one, a phone number. A care service is a regulated business rather than a company or a public body. The manager name, the eForms address, and the inspection grades, complaints and enforcements that the same file contains are not carried, and childminding contact details are absent from the source itself. The regulator publishes no website for any service, so where a record carries one it was found by search and checked against that service, and it is never presented as quoted from the datastore: 4,071 of the 10,359 carry a website of their own, 443 a labelled directory page instead, and 1,086 a phone number the regulator does not publish, counted on 30 October 2026. A page that is not the service's own is linked under the name of whoever wrote it.

Library outlets come from the Improvement Service dataset for Scotland, read on 26 October 2026: 425 outlets as returned by the councils. It is not a national register and does not claim to be, because it is the 32 council returns amalgamated. Glasgow City returns one branch. South Lanarkshire returned names without addresses, and 22 of those rows cannot be placed and are not carried at all. Some councils have not refreshed since 2017. 425 of 455 rows were placeable. The source holds no phone number and no opening hours, so neither appears in this class.

Dental practices are quoted from Public Health Scotland's Dental Practices and Patient Registrations, as at 31 March 2026 and published on 26 May 2026: 989 NHS practices, each cited by its practice code. The dataset is published monthly at a lag of about three and a half months, because practices have up to three months to submit claims, so the newest snapshot is not the current month. The registrations figure counts patients registered for NHS dental care at that practice, which is a measure of size and never of quality. 110 practices are listed by their address rather than a name, because the source publishes the first line as address1 and for those it is a street: those records say so. The source holds no website and no phone number, and where a record carries either, it was found by search and checked against the practice, never presented as quoted from the national list.

Two things here are not register data and are never presented as if they were. A website reaches a company's record only when a person sent it and it was checked against that record, because the register holds no web addresses. A listing belongs to a Scottish business, trade, place to stay, band, charity or club with no company number at all: it is as submitted, on a Scottish address checked by hand, and it is marked on the page wherever it appears.

Historic places are quoted from Historic Environment Scotland's open data, read on 29 October 2026: 754 records, being the Properties in Care (the sites Historic Environment Scotland looks after), the Inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, the Inventory of Historic Battlefields, and the world heritage sites. A historic place is a place, not a company and not a business: no company number, no owner to trace. This is a useful rough guide rather than a complete list of what is worth visiting. Scheduled monuments are a separate decision and are not carried yet, which is why the class is described this way on every page. No opening hours, prices or "open now" is carried anywhere, because the source carries none: the link goes to the Historic Environment Scotland page for the place, described as their page rather than as the place's own website, and fourteen Properties in Care carry no link at all rather than a guessed one. No public-access claim is made either, and an Inventory garden is a designation rather than a promise of a gate, since many of them are private land. The position on each record is the centre of the published boundary rather than the gate, which is what the record states. Historic Environment Scotland publishes this data under the Open Government Licence and states that it is indicative only. Contains Historic Environment Scotland data © Historic Environment Scotland Scottish Charity No. SC045925 2026.

Distilleries are quoted from the Scotch Whisky Association's own visitor map, read on 30 October 2026: 151 places, being the distilleries on that map that publish a website of their own, which is the test for this class. A distillery is a place rather than a company: the owner is quoted exactly as the Association publishes it, and it is not always the company that holds the licence, because a distillery is named after a place and its owner after a group. A company record is linked only where the owner's name matched a Scottish register record exactly. No opening hours, prices, public-access claim or visitor-centre flag is carried anywhere, because the Association publishes none of those per site: the distillery's own website is linked and the reader checks it. This is not every distillery in Scotland. The Association publishes no licence for its list, so the facts are quoted with credit and the map is linked rather than the dataset reproduced.

Sporting estates are assembled from the registers rather than from a list somebody compiled, and each record states plainly what it does and does not know. 19 records: for 12 a company has its registered office at the estate and the people filed against that company are named and linked to Companies House; for 2 there is no estate company and a different named route is recorded, being a charity for one and an overseas entity for the other, and an overseas holding shows only in the register of persons holding a controlled interest in land because there is no UK company to look up at all; and for 5 nothing was established, and the record says what was searched rather than staying silent. A registered office at an estate proves how the estate is administered, not who owns the land: the title itself is a paid search of the Land Register of Scotland, one title at a time, and Keek does not hold it, so no record here claims an owner. A postcode is printed only where a register gave it, and the record says which register. Directors are named because they are publicly filed officers of companies; a recorded person on the controlled-interest register may hold a security declaration, so those are counted and linked to and never named. This is not a list of every sporting estate in Scotland.

Venues for what's on are ours rather than a register's, built from OpenStreetMap and Google Places and cut to one rule on 2 November 2026: a venue is a place at which an event can be staged in front of an audience. 359 places meet it. Those sources label a great many things as venues, so a theatre company, a drama school, a football ground, a cinema and a shopping centre are held out rather than deleted, each with the reason it left, and the label the source gave a place is kept on the record beside the class it was given. OpenStreetMap's credit is printed on every venue card, because its licence asks for it.

Keek is independent. It is not affiliated with Companies House, the Electoral Commission, the Scottish Government, or any public body.