Methodology — Business Guidance Finder

The problem

GOV.UK holds 250,000+ pages of guidance. A small business owner who "runs a café and employs staff" must navigate tax, employment law, food hygiene and more across many disconnected pages. The navigation friction is real and avoidable.

What this tool does

• Queries the open, no-auth GOV.UK Content API for pages matching a plain-language description of the business.
• Deterministically tags each result with a topic bucket (keyword match — no machine learning).
• Links straight to the official GOV.UK page.

Data source & honesty

Results are fetched live from https://www.gov.uk/api/search.json at request time. If that source is unavailable, the tool shows an honest "source unavailable" message — it never fabricates results. Economic impact is unquantified until measured usage data exists.

Calculation

Topic classification: the business description + page title/description is lower-cased and tested against fixed keyword lists per topic. A page may match multiple topics. No scoring model, no LLM.