What we found
Searching the firm's own short name returned a Companies House entry on the first page. It is exactly the result a careful person clicks: official, free, and apparently definitive.
The one ranking was an LLP dissolved in April 2023. The limited company that actually employs people and takes instructions is incorporated under a different name and was not on that page anywhere.
Why this happens, and why it persists
Dissolved entries stay on the register permanently and stay indexed. They were often the company for years, so they have the older URL, the inbound links and the accumulated history that makes a page rank.
The new company, by contrast, is newer, has a different name, and is often not linked from anywhere except its own site. Everything that makes the old entry rank is missing from the new one.
The dead company is not ranking because something went wrong. It is ranking because it has been there longer and more things point at it.
Who this costs you with
Anybody running a credit check, a supplier approval, a panel application or simple due diligence. Those are exactly the people whose opinion you cannot afford to leave to a stale search result.
It is worse than a bad result, because a dissolved company reads as a warning rather than as an error. A reader who does not know your history will interpret it, and the interpretation will not be charitable.
What to do
In order, and most of it is free:
- State your CURRENT company number on your own website, in plain text, where it can be read. Most small firms do not, despite being required to.
- Use one company name everywhere, the one on the register today, including in your own copy about your history.
- Make sure your own site is the strongest thing carrying that current name, so there is something for the correct entry to rank alongside.
- Check what the register itself says about your officers and addresses, because that is what gets read.
You cannot have the dissolved entry taken down, and you should not want to: the register is a public record and the history is legitimate. What changes is which one a reader finds first. Is your company number even right? covers the related fault, which is worse.
A family law firm audited in August 2026. The Companies House result on page one for their short name was an LLP dissolved in April 2023. The limited company that actually trades, incorporated under a different name, did not appear on that page.