Georgia Secretary of State Business Search

You can find business information for companies in Georgia through the Secretary of State's Corporations Division website. Although the search functions are very limited and basic, searches are simple and straightforward. Below we'll walk through the steps for doing this, and show you some additional resources you might not know about.

There are a number of reasons you might need this information. It's absolutely critical when performing due diligence and Know Your Client (KYC) purposes when you're onboarding new customers. If you're only performing these kinds of searches occasionally, the search portal offered by the Georgia Secretary of State allows you to find what you're looking for relatively quickly and easily. If you're searching records like these in high numbers, there are some tools you'll want to know about, but we'll come back to that in just a moment.

You can find business information at the Georgia Secretary of State's business search page, found here. When you arrive, you'll see a very basic search interface.

In addition to searching by the company name, you can also search by their Control Number, or by the name of an Officer or Registered Agent of the company. You can limit the search by 'Starts With', 'Contains', or 'Exact Match' for the term you enter, but those are the only limits.

The search results page returns 25 records at a time, and they're arranged alphabetically.

There's a decent amount of information available on the results page - the Business Name and Control Number, the Business Type, the Principal's mailing address, the name of the Registered Agent for the business, and the company's Status. Helpfully, you can also sort the results by clicking on the header.

Some of the search results are a bit difficult to decipher initially. For example, as you can see in the screenshot above, the search ignores spaces and other characters. Even more confusing, the first result for 'begins with acme' is 1-800-Got-Bins. Clicking through to the business details page provides additional information about the business, but it doesn't make this any clearer.

On each of the details pages, however, you'll notice that there are three links near the bottom: Filing History, Name History, and one to return to the results page. In this case, viewing the Name History solves the mystery.

In this case, 1-800-Got-Bins used to be known as Acme Handcrafted Fire Pits.

This is only one example, but the takeaway is important. For any search you perform, you'll receive a large number of results that aren't an immediately apparent match. If you're performing a number of these searches, this could result in a lot of additional time spent interpreting results and looking for the business you're trying to find.

Georgia's Secretary of State offers simple functionality when searching for business information. There are some useful filters, but the results can be a bit confusing. If you need to search for hundreds - or even thousands - of these records each month, this would quickly consume a lot of time. Furthermore, Secretary of State data is different from one state to another, so combining and integrating data from multiple states is complex.