The register holds no published entries. Not a small number, not a soft launch, not a seed set. Zero.
If you came to find a business, this is not yet worth your time and you should leave. That sentence is the whole reason this post exists, and everything below it is detail.
What this is, and who it is for
This is the coverage report: how much is in the register, what shape it is, where it is thin, and what it deliberately will not cover. It is for someone deciding whether to invest attention here, and for an operator wondering whether there is a gap their business would fill.
The rule governing it is simple and it is the only reason to trust anything in it: every number in this post comes from the register or the assessment log, or it is not published. Nothing here is rounded up, projected forward, estimated from a trend, or described as growing. Where a figure does not exist, the post says the figure does not exist rather than reaching for a proxy.
Right now, almost every figure does not exist. That is an unflattering thing to publish and it is the correct thing to publish.
How many entries there are, as of the date of this review
Zero.
No entry has cleared the bar and published. There is no partial list, no draft set visible somewhere, and no private version that is fuller than the public one.
This is deliberate rather than a delay. The alternative, which is what the category usually does, is to seed a new register by importing businesses from somewhere else, or by listing things a person has heard of, and then tightening the criteria afterwards. That produces a register whose early entries were never judged against anything, sitting alongside later ones that were, with no way for a reader to tell which is which. The criteria and the method were published first specifically so the first entry can be judged rather than accepted.
The cost of that decision is the paragraph at the top of this page. We would rather pay it once than carry an unauditable set of entries indefinitely.
Which categories exist, and which are still below the three-entry gate
No category page is published, and every possible category is below the gate.
The gate works like this. A category page does not publish until it holds at least three entries that meet the bar and has an editorial introduction written by a person. A category with one entry is a page built to exist rather than to be read, and an empty category page is a doorway with better manners. So a category that cannot reach three shows nothing at all.
There is a related decision worth naming, because its absence would otherwise look like an oversight. We do not publish a list of hoped-for categories. A roadmap of category names reads as coverage to anyone skimming. The admission rule is three qualifying entries plus a human-written introduction, so the category list is a consequence of the recorded evidence rather than a plan for it.
Where the coverage is thinnest, and why
Everywhere, evenly, because there is no coverage.
The more useful version of this section is the structural one: which gaps are likely to persist even once entries exist, so that a reader can calibrate what this register will and will not be good at.
- Anything hard to check remotely. Businesses trading only inside a platform we cannot see into, sites behind a login, and services sold entirely by conversation are all cases where a dated check is a weak instrument. The method says so plainly rather than pretending otherwise.
- Businesses whose independence cannot be established. Where ownership has no checkable answer, the answer is no rather than a guess. This will refuse some genuinely independent operators, and we would rather record that as a known weakness than let the criterion look cleaner than it is.
- Places and physical businesses. The verification requirements are strictest here, and the checks are slowest, so this lane will lag the online-only one for structural reasons rather than editorial ones.
- Anywhere our reviewers cannot read the language or the trading context. A check requires judgement, and judgement requires understanding what you are looking at.
None of these is a promise to fix. They are the shape of the instrument.
How many tombstones there are, and what that ratio means
Zero, and necessarily so. Tombstones are entries confirmed no longer trading, and there are no entries to lose.
The ratio between entries and tombstones is worth explaining now, before it exists, because it is routinely read backwards.
A register with no tombstones is usually a register nobody is checking. Small businesses close. Some proportion of anything listed today will not be trading in two years, and a listing site showing no losses at all is either brand new or is quietly deleting. Deleting is the common choice, because a shrinking list looks like failure, and it destroys the one useful piece of information the situation produces: whether the thing you remember actually closed.
So tombstones here are a maintenance signal rather than a failure signal, and a rising count alongside a rising entry count is the healthy pattern. Publishing an uncomfortable ratio is the point of having one. What happens when a listed business disappears sets out the sequence that produces a tombstone, including the two failed checks fourteen days apart and the human confirmation that has to come before one publishes.
The refusal rate so far
There is no refusal rate. No submissions have been assessed.
No refusal rate is estimated from the criteria or borrowed from elsewhere. This edition supplies no assessment log, so the rate is not measured; the entry bar and refusal file define the evidence required for any observed value.
The refusal file is worth reading in the meantime, because the patterns it predicts from the criteria tell you more about what this register will contain than a percentage would.
What we are deliberately not covering
Some absences are gaps, to be filled when someone submits something. Others are exclusions, and will never be filled. Confusing the two would make the register look far patchier than it is.
Excluded outright, regardless of how well an individual business would otherwise qualify:
- Adult commerce.
- Gambling, betting and prediction markets.
- Lending, credit, debt management and related financial services.
- Supplements, health products and anything making a health claim.
- Multi-level marketing and recruitment-driven income schemes.
- Crypto tokens, exchanges and trading services.
- Anything requiring a licence, registration or professional authorisation we cannot verify.
These reflect regulatory, safety and verification exposure we are not equipped to carry, and they are not a judgement on any operator in them. Reopening one is a legal decision taken with advice, not an editorial decision taken because a good business asked.
Two more absences that are structural rather than categorical. Properties owned by this publisher are excluded, with no exception available. And there are no location-by-category pages, no "best in" pages, and no plans for any, because that page type is a doorway rather than a register.
How to fill a gap
If something you know should be here, tell us about it.
- Check it against the six criteria at the entry bar first. Most refusals are avoidable and the fixes cost nothing.
- Submit it. It is free, there is no paid or expedited route, and buying anything from this site has no effect on consideration.
- Expect it to be slow, and expect a refusal to be more likely than an acceptance. How to submit a business sets out the whole sequence, including every reason we might come back with a no.
You can submit a business you do not own. That is often how good entries are found. The operator is normally contacted before publication and can have the entry removed afterwards regardless of who submitted it.
One thing worth stating because it is the obvious next question: there is no ordering to compete for and nothing to be first in. Nothing on this site is ranked, so an early entry gains no position. We do not rate anyone covers why.
How to read this snapshot
The figures below are a dated null result, not a forecast of future coverage. A later snapshot is a different record and must state the method and entry-bar versions used.
In Plain English
The recorded snapshot contains no published entries, no tombstones, and no assessed submissions, so it supports no refusal rate or category coverage claim. Those zeros are the complete result: the page does not seed the register with unassessed businesses or quote an estimate. The permanent exclusions above describe verification limits rather than a view of the businesses in them.
Browse the register to see the current state for yourself, and the tombstones for the other half of the same accounting.