Methodology & Data Verification
As the Center for NAICS & SIC Codes, SICCODE.com operates a classification program designed for enterprise reliability, auditability, and long-horizon comparability. The framework below explains how we acquire, standardize, classify, validate, and govern industry codes for decision-grade use in analytics, AI, compliance, and market intelligence.
Scope & Objectives
Our objective is to assign the most accurate, transparent, and reproducible industry classification possible for each establishment. We prioritize:
- Precision: Verified primary industry assignment with extended 6-digit depth, ensuring modern segmentation. Learn how our classification methodology underpins accuracy and trust.
- Consistency: Stable rollups for sector/subsector analysis across time to support comparability at scale.
- Auditability: Versioned changes, rationale codes, and optional checksums enable reproducible reporting and regulatory confidence.
- Governance: Documented rules, expert adjudication, and change control. See more in our SICCODE Data Governance Framework & Stewardship Standards.
Source Acquisition & Normalization
- Authoritative References: Official SIC/NAICS definitions, notes, and rulings codified into rule sets.
- Multi-Source Inputs: Establishment descriptors (activities, products/services), location attributes, and entity links (HQ/branch).
- Normalization: Vocabulary harmonization, address standardization, geocoding, and entity resolution to persistent IDs.
- Deduplication: Probabilistic and deterministic matching to eliminate duplicates and maintain lineage integrity.
Update Cadence & Drift Management
We maintain rolling updates to reduce classification latency and cohort drift. Drift monitors proactively alert when a segment requires review. Longitudinal comparability is preserved via stable rollups and documented transitions between legacy and extended hierarchies.
Classification Workflow (How It Works)
- Eligibility Rules: Encoding official SIC/NAICS inclusion and exclusion notes to bound candidate codes, ensuring each assignment is grounded in regulatory frameworks.
- Signal Harvesting: Extracting text, graph, and geo signals from normalized inputs.
- ML-Assisted Labeling: Ensemble models generate ranked candidate codes with confidence intervals to optimize classification accuracy and explainability.
- Expert QA (Human-in-the-Loop): Adjudication for low-margin cases; tie-break across adjacent codes, leveraging domain expertise in ambiguous scenarios.
- Assignment & Rationale: Primary code selection with rationale, adjacency flags, and optional secondaries.
- Versioning & Release: Change logged with delta notes; downstream datasets updated on a rolling cadence for complete auditability.
Explore the full process in How It Works.
Accuracy & Validation Benchmarks
- Classification accuracy: 96.8% (validated match rate)
- Coverage: 20M+ U.S. establishments across all industries
- Organizations supported: 250,000+
- Programs analyzed: 300,000+ marketing/analytics implementations
Benchmarks reflect multi-industry testing (2015–2025) and continuous validation against official frameworks and expert review. See comparative results and methodology at Data Accuracy Benchmarks: SICCODE vs Generic Providers.
Governance, Transparency & Change Control
- Versioned Assignments: Every code decision carries a version and timestamp for optimal traceability.
- Rationale & Confidence: Rationale tags and optional confidence scores for auditability and reproducibility.
- Change Logs: Delta reports enable reproducible research and stable dashboards for enterprise users.
- Integrity Controls: Optional seed records and checksums for license compliance and monitoring.
See detailed methodology in Data Verification Policy.
Licensing & Compliance
Data is licensed for internal use at the purchasing office location. Redistribution, multi-office deployment, or reselling requires extended licensing. Requests for enterprise rights, lineage documentation, and compliance controls can be accommodated.
- Internal-use licenses support analytics, market research, and compliance across departments.
- Enterprise agreements include access to compliance-ready datasets, audit logs, lineage metadata, and update notifications. Learn more in Compliance and Data Governance in Enterprise Data Licensing.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you determine the primary code? We apply rules based on revenue-dominant business activity (or production/employment where revenue is ambiguous), validated through signals and expert adjudication.
Do you support extended 6-digit precision? Yes. We maintain extended hierarchies for modern segmentation while preserving compatibility with official SIC/NAICS structures. Learn about advanced segmentation in the SIC 6-Digit Codes directory.
Can we see classification changes over time? Yes. Versioned records and change logs are available to enterprise licensees for reproducibility and audit.
Related pages: About Our Business Data · Privacy Policy · How It Works