THE DATA CATALOG / 01 SOURCE

US SEC Company Search

Find a company. Understand its profile. Follow the information back to SEC EDGAR.

MCP tool · us_search_sec_company

What you can ask

Query

Required string. Whitespace is trimmed; the resulting string must contain 1–200 characters. Use an exact ticker (AAPL), a company-name substring (apple), or a CIK (320193, 0000320193, CIK0000320193).

CIKs contain 1–10 digits and must be greater than zero. The optional CIK prefix is case-insensitive. Malformed explicit CIKs are rejected; the bare symbol CIK is treated as a ticker.

Result limit

Optional integer from 1–20; default 10. Invalid values are rejected. Matches are deduplicated by CIK, sorted by company name then CIK, and limited before profiles are retrieved.

Exact ticker matches take priority. Otherwise, names are matched by substring. Both are case-insensitive. CIK lookup goes directly to the submissions source.

{ "query": "AAPL", "limit": 10 }

Coverage and freshness

Ticker and name search covers SEC’s current ticker directory. It is not an exhaustive search of historical filers or former company names. CIK lookup can retrieve a company outside that directory.

The directory is cached for 24 hours and keeps its original retrieval time. Expired data is refreshed on demand; failed refreshes do not silently return stale data. Company profiles are fetched on demand.

This tool returns company metadata and source links. It does not extract financial metrics, download filings, or count a company’s entire filing history.

Company profile fields

Missing scalar attributes are null; unavailable ticker and exchange collections are empty arrays. Missing values are never inferred.

Fields in each entry of the results array
Field	Type	Meaning
`cik`	`string`	Ten-digit SEC company identifier, including leading zeros.
`ticker`	`string[]`	Reported trading symbols. An empty array means unavailable.
`name`	`string \| null`	Company name reported in the submissions data.
`sic`	`string \| null`	Standard Industrial Classification code, preserved as a string.
`sic_description`	`string \| null`	SEC’s description of the industry classification.
`exchange`	`string[]`	Reported exchanges; no one-to-one mapping to ticker entries is implied.
`fiscal_year_end`	`string \| null`	Source month/day value (MMDD), such as 0930.
`state_of_incorporation`	`string \| null`	Source incorporation code, such as CA.
`recent_filings_count`	`number \| null`	Length of the fetched recent accession-number array. Not a lifetime total or a fixed calendar-period count. Null if the array is missing or invalid.
`source_url`	`string`	Official SEC submissions URL for this profile.
`retrieved_at`	`string`	UTC ISO-8601 time when BridgeHub fetched this profile, not SEC’s last update time.

Reading the response

The envelope includes query (trimmed string), limit (integer), outcome (string), results (profile array), and truncated (boolean). Truncation means additional matches were omitted by the result limit; it is separate from retrieval failures. Pagination is not included.

Directory-based searches also return directory_source, an object containing source_url and the original retrieved_at, both strings. Direct CIK lookups do not need directory provenance.

ok: selected profiles were retrieved.
no_matches: no directory match, or a direct CIK lookup returned SEC not found.
partial: some profiles succeeded; warnings (string array) and failures (object array) identify incompleteness.
error: discovery or all selected profile retrievals failed. An error object explains the failure and MCP marks the call as failed.

Errors include category and message strings and a retryable boolean. Each failure also includes its CIK string. Retryable means a later attempt may help; BridgeHub does not retry automatically. SDK argument-validation failures may use MCP’s own error format.

The result is returned as structured MCP content and equivalent JSON text. SEC errors, blocking, or timeouts are never reported as “no matches.”

Illustrative response

Example only — not live data.

All values below illustrate the response format. The timestamps and filing count are illustrative and must not be treated as current SEC information.

{
  "query": "AAPL",
  "limit": 10,
  "outcome": "ok",
  "results": [
    {
      "cik": "0000320193",
      "ticker": [
        "AAPL"
      ],
      "name": "Apple Inc.",
      "sic": "3571",
      "sic_description": "Electronic Computers",
      "exchange": [
        "Nasdaq"
      ],
      "fiscal_year_end": "0930",
      "state_of_incorporation": "CA",
      "recent_filings_count": 1000,
      "source_url": "https://data.sec.gov/submissions/CIK0000320193.json",
      "retrieved_at": "2026-01-15T12:00:00.000Z"
    }
  ],
  "truncated": false,
  "directory_source": {
    "source_url": "https://www.sec.gov/files/company_tickers.json",
    "retrieved_at": "2026-01-15T11:00:00.000Z"
  }
}

Follow the source

Source attribution: SEC EDGAR. Retrieval timestamps tell you when BridgeHub fetched the data, not when the SEC last changed it.

Official SEC ticker directory
Official Apple submissions data · profile URLs use a ten-digit CIK.
SEC EDGAR API documentation

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