How to Search Secretary of State Business Filings Programmatically (Multi-State)

If you work in KYC, compliance, sales, or due diligence, you've probably spent time on state Secretary of State websites manually searching for business entities. The experience is universally terrible -- each state has a different system, most are built on 2000s-era ASP.NET, and none of them talk to each other. There's no national business entity database. Each of the 50 states maintains its own registry independently. If you need to verify that "Acme LLC" is registered and active, you have to know which state it's registered in and search that state's specific portal. Here's what I've learned building tools to automate this across multiple states. The state-by-state landscape California Portal: bizfileonline.sos.ca.gov Searchable by: entity name, entity number Data available: entity name, number, type, status, formation date, jurisdiction, agent info API: CA has an unofficial API that returns JSON. It's the cleanest of any state. Texas Portal: SOSDirect (sos.state.tx.us) Searchable b