Trust in a verification tool depends on knowing where its answers come from. This page describes our data pipeline plainly — including its limits.
Where the data originates
All registration details shown on GST Search — legal name, trade name, status, registration date, state, constitution, taxpayer type and address — originate from GSTN registration records, the same underlying records the official portal exposes. We access them through authorised third-party GST verification API providers rather than by scraping the government portal. We deliberately maintain adapters for more than one provider, so a single provider outage or change does not take the service down, and we do not depend on any provider’s editorial layer — only on the registration fields themselves.
How caching works — and what “cached” means on a result
Calling a live API for every repeat search would be slow and wasteful, so we cache. Every result on the site is labelled either live (fetched from the provider during your search) or cached (served from our store, with the record’s fetch time available). Our standard refresh windows:
| Record type | Maximum cache age before refresh | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Active GSTIN details | Up to 30 days | Registration details change infrequently for active taxpayers. |
| Cancelled GSTIN details | Up to 90 days | Cancellation is close to a terminal state; changes are rare. |
| PAN → GSTIN listings | Up to 7 days | New state registrations appear on a PAN over time. |
| Name search results | Up to 24 hours | Fuzzy matches deserve fresh underlying data. |
| “Not found” results | Up to 24 hours | Genuinely new registrations should become visible within a day. |
The honest implication: a status change — say an Active registration being suspended — can take up to the relevant window to appear here if the record was recently cached. For payment-critical decisions on a cached result, re-run the lookup; a fresh search of a stale record triggers a live refresh in most cases. More context on interpreting statuses is on the GST number check page.
What we compute ourselves
Format validation and the GSTIN check digit are computed on our own servers, before any API is called — the algorithm is public and described in our GST number format guide. State names are resolved from the standard code table on the GST state code list. Editorial guides are written by us and reviewed against the current public rules; we do not publish invented statistics.
Corrections
If a record we display about your business is outdated or wrong, we want to fix it: the process and timelines are on the takedown and correction page. Broader questions about this pipeline are welcome via the contact page — and our disclaimer sets out the formal limits of what a lookup can promise.