Ask an AI, get an answer. Ask OwnedBy, get a record.
OwnedBy follows public records to show who owns or controls the business behind it. Every link carries its receipt, and the record shows where the documented chain ends.
- A brand enteredLookup subject
- A working hypothesisInternal · not published
- A cited ownership recordPublished with receipts
The working hypothesis stays internal. An ownership link appears only after an admissible public source is attached.
How a lookup works
Who owns or controls the business behind a product? The right product and the right business are identified first, then each ownership and control relationship is traced upward.
- 01
Identify
Match the brand, product, and legal business.
- 02
Trace
Follow parents, owners, and controlling parties.
- 03
Compare
Compare sources appropriate to each type of fact.
- 04
Bound
Show the last supported link and what remains open.
Four facts, kept apart
A business can operate or manufacture in Canada while being owned by an entity elsewhere. An address, a flag or a factory is not treated as proof of ownership—so these four facts are kept apart, and none is allowed to masquerade as another.
- Fact 01
Ownership
Which person or entity legally owns the business?
- Fact 02
Control
Who can direct the company’s decisions?
- Fact 03
Operations
Which entity runs the business and employs people here?
- Fact 04
Manufacturing
Where is the product made or assembled?
Two speeds, honestly labelled
The four steps above are the same four moves, drawn here as the two lanes they actually run in.
Within seconds, orientation establishes what the subject is and organizes the research. Any ownership hypothesis stays internal: no ownership link appears on the record until an admissible public source supports it.
The evidence lane then works primary sources — legal-entity identifiers, corporate registries, regulatory filings, companies’ own published documents. Each admitted ownership link arrives with the source that supports it.
The interface never claims more certainty than the record holds. The confidence ladder is a product guarantee, not decoration.
What every claim has to survive
Identifiers
The right business, not the right name
Which business a name refers to is settled before anything is researched about who owns it — and it is a real question, because the same brand name can belong to different companies in different countries. When two readings are genuinely close, you are asked which one you meant rather than handed a guess.
Primary sources
Official registers, read directly
The trademark registers (CIPO in Canada, the USPTO in the US) for which legal entity holds a mark in its territory; the global legal-entity register (GLEIF) for the parent a company reports consolidating into; Corporations Canada for a company’s registered legal name and number; securities filings (SEC EDGAR) for whether a company is listed and where it is incorporated. Each establishes a piece of the chain, never the whole of it.
Primary sources
Every published link carries a source
A record lets you open the source behind each published ownership link. It names the publisher and shows the date we last checked it where that date was recorded — never dressed up as a publication date.
Admission
The page has to say it, in its own words
When the research reads an article or a company page, the claim counts only if that page’s own sentence states it — the exact sentence, found verbatim on the page. A paraphrase of it, or a summary of what the page seemed to mean, is refused.
Admission
Two sources have to be two sources
A company’s own website is never independent confirmation of who owns that company. And two pages carrying the same copied text count as one source, not two: a press release republished ten times is still one press release.
Admission
Disagreement outranks agreement
If a source names a different owner, the claim is not published as settled. The contradiction wins until it is resolved, however many sources sit on the other side of it.
Admission
An announcement is not an acquisition
A sentence has to state the change as done. “Agreed to acquire”, “is in talks to acquire” and “will acquire” are all refused — so a deal that has been announced and not completed cannot move an owner on the record.
The record
The confidence word is a ceiling
Confirmed, Likely, Tracing and Unconfirmed describe how well the answer is supported — never how our work is going — and each is capped by the kind of evidence underneath it. A model-only hunch stays internal; an ownership link reaches the record only after a source passes admission.
The record
Where the public record stops, the record stops
When the layer above is not publicly disclosed, the record says so — traced as far as the public record goes — rather than guessing at who sits above it.
No one register holds the whole answer. A legal-entity register knows the parent a company reports consolidating into, and nothing about the brand on the shelf; a company register knows a legal name and not who holds the shares. Registry evidence is used wherever it exists, and the checks above are what turn separate pieces into a chain worth following.
What each confidence word means
The word describes how well the ownership conclusion is supported. It is separate from where our research has got to: research can continue after a provisional answer.
- Confirmed
- An appropriate, admissible source names the owner or controller, with no credible contradiction.
- Likely
- Sources agree, but one link is less direct or remains an inference.
- Tracing
- Research is active. Supported facts stay on screen while we continue.
- Unconfirmed
- The sources we could reach do not yet support naming an owner with enough confidence.
Where a chain is allowed to stop
Private companies, trusts, co-operatives, joint ventures and public companies do not disclose the same information. We name the structure and the last supported link instead of filling the gap with a guess.
A record shows the primary public evidence available for the conclusion it displays, and the limitations that matter. A record can change when a new filing or a reliable correction appears.
Never confidently wrong
A language model on its own produces a plausible sentence with nothing behind it. It was trained months ago, it cannot cite anything, and it sounds identical whether it knows or is guessing.
OwnedBy uses language models the way a newsroom uses researchers: they orient, they plan, and they read. But no ownership link is published without an admissible public source attached to it. Every link in the chain carries its receipt.
| Aspect | A chatbot answer | An OwnedBy record |
|---|---|---|
| Sources cited | A chatbot answerNone. The answer arrives with nothing behind it. | An OwnedBy recordEvery link carries its own, one tap away. |
| Freshness | A chatbot answerFixed at the model’s training cutoff. | An OwnedBy recordDated, then updated by scheduled registry refreshes or operator review. |
| When it is unsure | A chatbot answerAnswers anyway, in the same confident voice. | An OwnedBy recordSays so. A withheld answer is still an answer. |
| When the world changes | A chatbot answerNothing changes until the next training run. | An OwnedBy recordThe record is revised, and the earlier version is kept. |
| The same answer for everyone | A chatbot answerTwo people can get two different answers. | An OwnedBy recordOne shared record, with its provenance attached. |
| Accountability | A chatbot answerNothing to flag, and nobody to flag it to. | An OwnedBy recordEvery record carries a way to flag an error on it. |
Every release candidate is tested on frozen, adjudicated cases and then on the exact deployment before production, with zero tolerance for two categories of error: a wrong ownership resolution and a wrong company identity. Blind corpora are used for generalization claims.
When the engine cannot verify something, it abstains and says so. We take precision over recall: a withheld answer is still an answer, and “ownership isn’t publicly disclosed for this one” is a fact about the world rather than a failure.
Live-research records are append-only and bitemporal: we record both when a fact was true in the world and when we learned it. Curated directory records follow a separate editorial review.
That discipline extends to the registers themselves. In our head-brand research cohort — 11,188 serials from the United States trademark register — 26% showed a superseded holder at face value. The correction may sit in the assignment history; without its row-specific receipt, we withhold the record rather than publish that holder.
And 46% of the 8,894 assignment events reviewed in that cohort transferred no ownership: they were security interests or releases. Assignment-corrected rows therefore stay out of the published chain until their complete reel-and-frame receipt is attached.
A registry that researches itself
Tracing one brand’s ownership properly takes a human analyst hours, sometimes days: registries, filings, cross-referencing, dead ends. Multiply that by every brand on every shelf and you get careers of analyst time that nobody will ever fund.
The pipeline turns that work into a compounding public asset. A brand is researched once, then the resulting record can be served to everyone who looks it up afterwards. Newer revisions come from scheduled registry refreshes or operator review—not because a shopper reopened the record.
Language models made research cheap. Provenance is what makes it trustworthy — verification is the scarce resource now, and that is the part we industrialised.
Ownership as infrastructure
What comes next is a public API: the same records, the same provenance, available programmatically. Everything described above exists today; this section is direction, and we are not putting a date on it.
The point of an API is what other people do with it. Organisations plugging the records straight into their own work: research, tools that hand customers the same fact a shopper gets, business intelligence, and an honest read on how people perceive a brand’s ownership as against who actually owns it.
If you are building something that rests on ownership transparency, that is what we want to make possible.