I started tracking UK business domain changes — it turned into something much bigger

[MELIAM]

I've been working on a data experiment that originally started because of my interest in domains.

I wanted to see whether I could identify businesses that had changed from one domain to another by comparing successive monthly UK business/place datasets.

I compared July → August 2026 and found 14,044 own-domain → own-domain changes.

But once I'd built the comparison, I realised there was quite a bit more hiding in the monthly changes.

The same comparison found:

• 56,976 existing-business records with a meaningful change
• 90,234 newly observed places
• 11,497 genuine phone-number changes
• websites being added
• websites being removed
• places no longer observed

Rather than just recording that something changed, I've kept the useful business record with it — business name, category, location, postcode, phone, current website and the before/after values where applicable.

I've ended up building a small site around the experiment, ChangeCapture.co.uk/Samples, where I've put up 50-record samples of each change type so people can see what the data actually looks like.

I'm not really posting this as a sales pitch — the full files aren't even available yet. I'm interested in whether other people can see uses for this data that I haven't thought of.

Obviously, the 14,044 domain changes caught my attention as a domainer, but I'm starting to think the newly observed businesses and website-added/removed data could be just as interesting.

What would you look for in data like this?