How UncoveredList builds every list

1. Sources: official state records only

Every lead starts as a public record published by a state agency on its official open-data portal. We read these through each portal's public API, read-only, with no logins, no paid data and no scraping of social profiles. We check each portal's robots.txt and wait one second between requests.

Trigger signals come from these public datasets and are matched to new businesses by normalized name plus ZIP, city or street number:

• New USDOT registrations: FMCSA Company Census File (U.S. DOT) (All five states)
• Pending liquor licenses: New York State Liquor Authority (New York)
• Pending liquor permits: Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection (Connecticut)
• Recently approved liquor licenses: Colorado Department of Revenue (Colorado (the state publishes approvals, not pending applications))

Full attributions, terms notes and the State of Colorado's required disclaimer are on Data sources.

2. What we collect, and what we don't

We keep business-level fields: business name, entity type, filing or permit date, city, ZIP, county (where published), the state's NAICS code (Connecticut and Texas), a business address, and a link back to the official record.

We don't collect people: our requests ask the state APIs only for business-level columns. Officer, organizer, member, filer, owner, taxpayer and individual registered-agent names are not requested or stored, and Connecticut's principals dataset is not fetched. A registered-agent name is read in memory only when it is a company, to detect mail drops, and is never saved.

3. How shells, holding companies and mail drops are filtered

Many new filings are not operating businesses an agent can insure. Before scoring, we remove:

Holding and investment shells

Names built around holding, holdings, ventures, equity, capital, investments, assets, portfolio, series, SPV, family LLC/trust/partnership, or a bare street address, when the industry is a holding, property or unclassified entity. These rarely buy small-commercial coverage.

Registered-agent mail drops

Filings whose only address is a registered-agent or formation-service company (for example national filing services), and Colorado or Connecticut filings whose principal address is the same as the agent company's address.

New York service-of-process via an agent company

New York publishes only a service-of-process address. When that is a registered-agent company, we can't locate the business, so it is removed.

Shared virtual-office addresses

Any address shared by 10 or more new entities in one pull (outside Texas) is treated as a virtual office or agent address and removed.

Out-of-state and inactive entities

Colorado: domestic entities in Good Standing only. New York: New York entities only. Pennsylvania: foreign (out-of-state) registrations excluded. Texas: Texas locations only.

People, not businesses

Texas sole proprietors whose trade name is just their own name are skipped. We never store officer, organizer, member, filer, owner or individual registered-agent names.

These rules are pattern-based, so some leakage both ways is likely: a few real businesses get removed and a few shells get through. Filings tagged as real-estate holding entities are kept but scored low (base 25), because some agents write landlord policies.

4. The commercial insurance need score (1–100) and tiers

The score estimates how likely a new business is to need commercial coverage soon. It is rules-based and fully explainable: each lead carries a one-line reason, such as "Trucking & Transportation (base 85); physical address; new USDOT registration".

Step 1: a base score from the industry

Step 2: adjustments from the record

• +5The state reports a NAICS industry code (Connecticut and Texas)
• +5A physical business address (not a PO box and not only a service-of-process address)
• +3Corporation rather than LLC
• +10Matched to a new USDOT registration (FMCSA)
• +8Matched to a pending liquor license application (approved license in Colorado)
• −5PO box is the only address
• −5Low-confidence industry tag
• −15Nonprofit entity
• −15Texas: a new location of a business that already holds a sales-tax permit

The result is capped between 1 and 100. The same inputs always give the same score.

Step 3: thresholds and tiers

• High need (70+): the threshold we use in our stats and reports.
• Hot: a business in one of the six highest-urgency industries (Trucking & Transportation, Construction & Contractors, Restaurants, Food & Bars, Healthcare & Wellness, Auto Services & Dealers, Security & Staffing) that scores 75 or more.
• Super hot: every Hot business scoring 100, plus the highest-scoring Hot businesses up to 5% of its own state's new businesses (last 45 days), recalculated after every daily update. Leads with the same score are ordered newest filing first, so the 5% cut-off can fall inside a score. All 100s are always included, so a state where more than 5% of leads score 100 (Connecticut, for example) has more Super hot leads and no extras below 100. We rank within each state because states publish different fields: Connecticut and Texas include an industry code, Colorado and New York don't, so a single cut-off (we used 95+ until October 2026) gave Colorado and New York almost no Super hot leads. Because it's a share, every state has some Super hot leads each day, and a Super hot lead in one state may have a lower raw score than one in another.

In our October 2026 snapshot of 19,733 new businesses, 6,730 (34%) scored 70+, 4,229 were Hot and 577 were Super hot. See the New Business Pulse for the breakdown and date coverage.

5. AI industry tagging

Industry is the biggest input to the score, and most states don't publish it. We assign one of 20 insurance-oriented segments in three steps:

1. State NAICS code where the state reports one (Connecticut, Texas), with overrides for codes whose sector is misleading.
2. Keyword rules on the business name, where a specific trade ("roofing", "barber shop") beats a generic word ("shop", "group").
3. AI review: an AI model (Grok, from xAI) reviews the rules' answer for each new lead and confirms or corrects it. Low-confidence AI guesses never replace the rules, a state-reported NAICS code is only overridden when the AI is confident, and names that say nothing about the business (personal names, invented words) stay Unclassified. Only business-level fields are sent: name, entity type, city and NAICS code.

Limits: rules and AI can both mislabel a business, most often when the name is ambiguous, so check the business before you quote. In the current snapshot, 2,642 of 19,733 businesses (13%) are left Unclassified because the name alone doesn't say what they do. Each daily run has an AI spending cap; when it is reached, the remaining leads keep their rules-based tag.

6. Update timing

Our daily job runs every morning and finishes before 6 AM Mountain Time, so subscriber digests can go out by 6 AM MT (digests start at launch). How fresh a lead is depends on the state:

• Colorado, New York, Connecticut: published daily or nightly, usually 1–2 days after filing.
• Pennsylvania: the open-data file refreshes weekly to monthly and lags about two weeks.
• Texas: sales-tax permits refresh about weekly.

Every lead shows its own filing or permit date, so you always know how old it is.

7. Limitations

• Short history. Our lead database starts with filings from mid-September (Pennsylvania) and October 2026 (other states). We can't yet show month-over-month trends.
• Texas records are permits, not formations, and include new locations of existing businesses (scored down). A pull can hit our 5,000-record cap, in which case the oldest days in the window are incomplete.
• Addresses. New York publishes only a service-of-process address. Colorado addresses can be PO boxes, out-of-state addresses or agent addresses. We show city and ZIP, not a verified location.
• Industry tags can be wrong (see above), and some businesses can't be classified from their name.
• Filtering is rules-based, so some shells and mail drops get through and some real businesses are removed.
• Public records have errors and delays. States can change or stop a feed. Official records are available only from the issuing agency.
• Not advice. Scores and coverage suggestions are estimates, not insurance, underwriting, legal or compliance advice.

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