Nevada Secretary of State Business Search

The state of Nevada makes it relatively simple to look up business information through the website of the Secretary of State. Below we'll walk through the steps for doing this, and show you some additional resources you might not know about.

There are any number of reasons you might need this information. It's absolutely critical when performing due diligence and for Know Your Client (KYC) purposes. If you're only performing these kinds of searches occasionally, Nevada's search portal allows you to find the information you're looking for 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 the Business Entity search page - part of Nevada's 'SilverFlume' business portal - linked above. The landing page looks like this:

The site offers a number of search filter options right upfront, which can be helpful in narrowing down your results.

With the radio buttons at the top, you can limit your results to records that begin with, contain, are an exact match for, or contain all the words in your search term. In the middle of the page are a few options for performing different kinds of searches - for a Registered Agent, for example, or for an owner of a trademark.

At the bottom of the page are more options for limiting a name search. You can search for a specific type of company (there are a lot of different options here: Domestic or Foreign Corporations, Domestic or Foreign LLPs, Domestic or Foreign LLCs, and so on). You can also limit your results by the status of the company - Active, Expired, Terminated, Withdrawn, and about twenty other options.

When you perform a search, you'll be directed to the results page, which looks like this:

The results are sorted by company name in alphabetical order. You cannot reverse the default order, or sort by another field.

On the results page, you'll see each company's name, status (all shown 'Active' here, as the results are filtered to only include those), the initial filing date for the company, the type of company it is (some of which are assigned a numeric code as you can see here), the Nevada Business ID and Entity Number.

The 'Mark Number' column is for results that are trademarks, not business entities. The links in the 'Actions' column redirect to a page with options for owners of the business.

Clicking on the name for any of the records will bring you to the Entity Information page for that business. Those pages organize the company's information in several cards, so let's look at them from top to bottom. At the top is the 'Entity Information' card, which looks like this:

(Looney Tunes fans will understand why I chose this company as an example.)

Most of the information here is repeated from the results page, with the exception of the 'Termination Date', if there is one, and the date the next filing is due.

Underneath that is the 'Registered Agent Information' card:

As the label would suggest, you can see the name and contact information for the company's Registered Agent.

Down at the bottom is the 'Officer Information' card:

Here you can see name and address information for the current officer or officers of the company. Clicking the 'View Historical Data' box will show previous officers that are no longer active. In the same box, at the bottom right, are a few more options. The buttons marked Name History and Mergers/Conversions History will display those, where they exist. The 'Filing History' button opens up a tab that looks like this:

The camera icon doesn't open a preview of a scanned document, or a download dialog box, as you might expect. Instead, it opens up another window, showing only the information that is contained in that filing:

There's one last frustration I'll mention here. The site has chosen to control potential malicious traffic by using verification challenges, which I ran into about every tenth time I clicked a button. Here's their explanation for this, and the simple logic puzzle I had to complete to continue:

It didn't take too long each time, but if I had to run multiple searches, it could get frustrating.

Nevada offers a reasonable amount of business information at no cost, and their search interface, with the filtering options they offer, makes the process relatively smooth and simple for each search. If you need to search for hundreds - or even thousands - of these records each month, though, 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.