Can AI monitor Companies House for you? What it catches, and what it still misses

Someone asks this almost every time a business starts watching suppliers, customers or acquisition targets more closely: can AI just monitor Companies House and tell us when something changes? The short answer is yes, there's a free, official way to do it, but the feed has real gaps worth knowing about before you rely on it.

What does Companies House actually publish?

Companies House holds the public record for every UK company: incorporation details, registered office, filing history (accounts, confirmation statements, charges), officers, and people with significant control (PSC), the individuals who actually own or control a company behind the corporate structure. All of it is free to search on the Companies House website, and all of it is also available through a free developer API, the same data, machine-readable.

Can AI watch it for you automatically?

Yes. Companies House runs a streaming API alongside its on-demand API, a long-running connection that pushes events as they happen rather than making you poll and re-check. It covers several data streams, including changes to a company's profile, new filings, officer and PSC changes, and charges and insolvency cases. A system can subscribe to the stream for the companies it cares about, or to the whole register, and act the moment a relevant event arrives rather than on whatever schedule a person remembers to check. The underlying API is free with a registered key, and its documented rate limit (a rolling window of several hundred requests every five minutes) is generous enough for monitoring a watchlist of real size.

What will it catch, and what will it miss?

• It catches: a new filing landing, a change of registered office or company name, an officer or PSC being added or removed, and a new charge being registered against the company's assets, all close to the moment Companies House processes them.
• It does not catch everything in one place. Director disqualifications sit on a separate part of the register from the main streams, so a monitoring system has to check for them specifically rather than assume they show up in the general feed.
• Insolvency has two records, not one. Companies House shows insolvency filings once they're made, but the formal legal notice (a winding-up petition, an administration or a liquidator's appointment) is published in The Gazette, the UK's official public record, which is a different feed with its own timing. A system that watches Companies House alone can miss the earlier signal that sits in the Gazette first.
• It reads structure, not intent. The feed tells you a PSC changed or a charge was registered; it does not tell you why, or whether that matters for your situation. That judgement still needs a person.

Where this is actually useful

The clearest wins are procurement and supplier risk (know when a key supplier's ownership, directors or charges change, rather than finding out when they stop delivering), customer credit risk, and anywhere a business already has a list of companies it needs to keep an eye on. It is also one of the public data sources behind property site sourcing: tracing who actually owns a company that holds a title, and watching for the filings that often precede a sale, both lean on the same Companies House data (see AI in property site sourcing for how that works end to end). In every case the pattern is the same: connect the public feed, filter it to what you care about, and put the result somewhere a person actually sees it, which is the same idea behind a Company Brain built over a business's own data.

Is this worth building, or is an off-the-shelf tool enough?

Several commercial monitoring tools already wrap this API for a fixed watchlist and a simple email alert, and for a short list of companies, one of those is the sensible starting point rather than a custom build. It becomes worth building something of your own once you need the feed filtered by rules specific to your business, combined with other sources (the Gazette, your CRM, your own supplier records), or wired into a workflow rather than an inbox, which is a connect-the-sources problem like any other, not a special case.

How does M22 help with this?

M22 Consultancy has built this kind of monitoring before, as part of a property intelligence platform that watches public filings for signals that precede a sale and traces ownership through company structures, described without naming the client on our work page. The same pattern, connect the public and internal feeds, filter to what matters, surface it where someone will see it, applies to supplier risk, customer onboarding or competitor tracking in any sector. The AI Audit, from £1,500 and agreed before day one, starts by mapping which of your own feeds and lists are worth connecting before anything gets built. Book a thirty-minute call to talk through what you'd want flagged, or see what this typically costs.