Methodology

The pipeline

Ingest, normalise, deduplicate, resolve entities, resolve geography, classify, check source quality, generate the signal, match to companies, deliver. Every stage is separable, and every stage can drop a candidate.

Ingest the world once, match it many times

A company check never crawls the internet, never runs a web search and never spends a model call to answer a question that has already been answered. Developments are ingested once into a central store; a company profile is built once and cached against its canonical domain; matching is a cheap retrieval against that store. That is what makes a check that costs almost nothing repeatable a million times, and it is why the same company pasted four different ways is treated as one company.

Fact and interpretation are different fields

A signal stores what happened in one field and what it may mean in another. They are rendered differently, labelled differently, and the interpretation always names how it was produced. AreaIQ never rewrites a source into a summary and then discards the source.

Relevance is not confidence

Relevance measures how closely a development matches your capabilities, sectors, markets and commercial triggers. It is deterministic set intersection over a controlled vocabulary, weighted 40/30/18/12 across capabilities, sectors, geography and trigger. It is not a model, and every score can be expanded to show which items matched.

Confidence measures how much AreaIQ trusts the underlying facts: whether a primary source confirms it, how many independent sources agree, publisher quality, recency and consistency. It is reported as high, medium or low rather than a percentage, because a decimal here would imply precision that does not exist.

A development can be highly relevant to you and poorly sourced. AreaIQ shows both numbers so you can tell the difference.

The threshold is published

A company check shows a development only when it scores 45 per cent or higher against the profile. Below that, AreaIQ says nothing was strong enough rather than padding the page. A threshold you cannot see is a threshold you cannot trust.

What AreaIQ will not do

It will not invent investment amounts, company names, dates, locations, people, attendance figures, procurement opportunities, statistics or source URLs. It will not tell you that an opportunity will generate business. Where evidence is insufficient it says so rather than filling the gap. Where a source link does not exist, it says the link does not exist.

Limits

Coverage is selective and may be delayed or incomplete. Automated interpretation may be wrong. Sources change, disappear and contain errors. AreaIQ is a discovery service that tells you where to look, and it is not a substitute for verification or professional advice.