Methodology: how whoreallyowns knows who owns what
This site answers one question — who really owns this local business? — for 40,914 veterinary clinics, dental practices, hospices, nursing homes, home-health agencies and HVAC & plumbing companies across the United States. Every ownership claim on every page links to the evidence behind it.
Evidence tiers
| confirmed | The owner's own location listing, a direct owner confirmation, or a mandated government ownership filing (for example CMS provider-ownership disclosures). These are the strongest sources: the owner or a regulator states the relationship. |
|---|---|
| reported | Press releases and news coverage of an acquisition. Reliable but second-hand; shown as “reported” until corroborated by a confirmed-tier source. |
| suspected | Indirect signals such as a shared registered agent or an HQ mailing address on a state license. These are never published as ownership labels — they only queue further research until corroborated by one of the tiers above. |
Claims policy
- Every public label derives only from accepted evidence with a citation URL that was fetched and confirmed. No fetch, no fact.
- We name organizations only, never individual people, as owners.
- We never assert that a business is “independent”. The absence of an ownership record is shown as no known corporate owner — absence of evidence is not proof of independence.
- Unverifiable ownership claims are omitted, never guessed.
Data sources
Claims are compiled from public records: companies' own published location directories, state facility-license registries, federally mandated provider-ownership disclosures, and press coverage of acquisitions — each fetched and verified before use. The citations on every page show exactly which sources back each claim.
Freshness
The directory is refreshed continuously. A business's page shows when it was last observed in a source.
Corrections
Every page shows the citations behind its claims, so errors can be traced to their source. If a source itself is wrong or stale, the refresh picks up the correction when the source does.