Government · UK · Competition and Markets Authority
UK Firms That Announce Growth Online Grow Twice as Fast
UK firms that publish growth announcements on their own websites grow headcount at about 20% a year, against 8.5% for firms that publish nothing. Only 3.8% of firms publish anything at all, and among businesses already growing employment by 20% or more a year, just 9% do.
Source published Summarised
Key findings at a glance
- 3.8% of UK firms with a web presence published at least one growth announcement between 2020 and 2025
- 11.2% of total UK employment came from those signalling firms, nearly three times their share of firms
- 20% average annual employment growth among firms that publish growth announcements
- 8.5% average annual employment growth among firms that publish none
- 24% average annual employment growth for firms announcing investment or hiring, the fastest-growing signal types
- 22% average annual employment growth for firms announcing partnerships and collaborations
- 18% average annual employment growth for firms announcing market entry or product innovation
- 9% of firms already growing employment by 20% or more a year publish any growth announcement at all
- 7.5% of digital and technology firms signal, the highest of the eight Industrial Strategy growth sectors
- 1.8% of construction firms signal, the lowest share of any industry section
- 4.9% of London firms signal, the highest share of any UK region
- 1.8 million UK firms with a web presence were crawled for the dataset, around 32% of the private sector business population
What the report covers
The Competition and Markets Authority published High-growth firms on 27 August 2026, a 123-page study from its Microeconomics Unit on how fast-growing UK businesses emerge, scale and sustain growth. Most of it is economics written for policymakers: how the choice of definition changes which firms count as high growth, how long growth episodes last, and what happens once a growth spell ends. Fewer than 1% of UK firms meet the OECD employment definition in a given year, yet they account for around 7.5% of UK turnover and employment.
The final chapter is the commercially interesting one. It tests whether the announcements a company publishes on its own website can identify fast-growing businesses earlier than official statistics, which arrive with a lag of a year or more. The CMA commissioned a dataset covering around 1.8 million UK firms with a web presence, crawled in late 2025, then matched those firms to Companies House records. It grouped 23 announcement types into four categories: partnerships and collaborations, market entry and product development, capital raising, and hiring.
Roughly 38,000 firms, 3.8% of the matched sample, published at least one such signal across 2020 to 2025, generating about 81,000 distinct announcements. Those firms are not a fringe: they accounted for 11.2% of total UK employment over 2020 to 2024, nearly three times their share of the business population. Coverage is the obvious limitation and the CMA says so plainly, since businesses without a website are underrepresented by design. That constraint is loosening as web adoption rises, a trend covered in our report on UK business website penetration.
What this means for UK marketers
The headline gap is not really a growth finding, it is a visibility finding. Only 9% of UK firms already growing employment by 20% or more a year publish any growth announcement at all. More than nine in ten genuinely fast-growing British businesses are therefore invisible to anyone reading the web for growth indicators, and that audience now includes government analysts, investors, data vendors, procurement teams and the language models that increasingly summarise a company before a buyer ever reaches its website.
Be clear about what the CMA does and does not claim. It states explicitly that its data cannot establish whether signals drive growth or merely accompany it, and treats the web analysis as suggestive rather than conclusive. Publishing a partnership announcement will not make a company grow 20% a year. What it does is make growth that is already happening legible to third parties. For most UK SMEs that is a cheap gap to close, because the raw material already exists: the funding round, the senior hire, the distribution deal, the product launch.
Signal density is also a targeting variable, and the spread is wide enough to change a prospecting plan. 7.5% of digital and technology firms signal, against 1.8% in construction. If you sell B2B into fast-growing tech, web announcements are a usable prospecting layer and worth building into lead scoring. If your ideal customer is a construction firm, the same approach surfaces almost nothing and you need a different route to intent. The regional spread runs the same way, with London firms signalling at 4.9%, well ahead of the rest of the UK.
The practical move is unglamorous. Publish the four things the CMA counted, as dated, individually addressable pages on your own domain rather than as a PDF or a post that lives only on LinkedIn. That is a content and technical exercise as much as a PR one, because crawlable URLs, clean structure and consistent naming are what make an announcement machine-readable. It is the same discipline behind our SEO services and our work on answer engine optimisation. An announcement nothing can parse is not a signal.
How they got the data
The core analysis uses ONS firm-level administrative and survey microdata drawn from the Inter-Departmental Business Register, which the CMA notes represents 97% of UK turnover and 88% of employment. High-growth firms are identified using several competing definitions, principally the OECD measures (annualised employment or turnover growth of at least 20% a year over three years, from a starting base of at least 10 employees) alongside distribution-based definitions capturing the top 10% of the growth-rate distribution. A separate strand uses experimental interbank transactions data, produced with the ONS and its partners Pay.UK and Vocalink and supplied on an anonymised and aggregated basis, to map firm-level supply networks. The financial sector and public administration are excluded, as are firm-years with non-financial turnover below GBP 10,000.
The growth signals dataset was commissioned from Glass.AI (Telectica Ltd) through a public tender. It crawled the online activity of UK firms with a web presence in late 2025, covering roughly 1.8 million firms, around 32% of the private sector business population. 39% matched to Companies House records. Among matched firms, employment data exists for about 62% of firm-year observations and turnover for only 8%, so employment is used throughout, and those figures run only to 2024 because of filing lags, meaning 2025 signals cannot yet be linked to outcomes. Duplicate signals were removed at firm level so counts reflect distinct events rather than the volume of online coverage. Web coverage is the binding constraint: the report cites 68% of UK businesses having a website in 2024, a figure DSIT's UK Business Data Survey put at 78% by 2026, so less digitally engaged firms are underrepresented by design.
Government · UK
Read the full report
From Competition and Markets Authority · published 27/08/2026