Does Your Company Qualify for a Wikipedia Page? The Real Requirements, the Sources That Count, and a 10-Minute Self-Test

Wikipedia has no minimum revenue, staff count, funding amount or company age. For organizations it has one gate, set out in WP:NCORP: a company is presumed notable when it has received significant coverage in multiple reliable secondary sources that are independent of it. The guideline opens bluntly: “No company or organization is considered inherently notable.”

Every source has to pass four tests at the same time. It must be significant (in-depth, not a passing mention), reliable (real editorial oversight), independent (not written, paid for or placed by the company) and secondary (reporting or analysis about the company, not the company's own documents). A source that fails one test is not counted at all.

Two other rules decide whether a page survives once it exists: verifiability (every claim traceable to a published source) and neutrality. Wikipedia is not an advertising or PR venue, and that rule is behind most “reads like an advertisement” declines. Better writing cannot repair a notability gap, which is why the sensible order of work is source audit first, draft second. Short answers to the most common questions sit in the FAQ.

This is where most self-assessments fail: a company's best-looking coverage is usually the kind reviewers discount. The categories below paraphrase WP:NCORP.

• Counts: in-depth reporting or analysis about the company in an outlet with editors and a correction policy. Examples are a newspaper or magazine feature, a book chapter and an academic study. The guideline expects at least one source with reach beyond a purely local audience.
• Does not count, because the company made it: press releases, sponsored posts, advertorials, “contributed” articles, pay-to-publish platforms, the company website and blog. Paid or sponsored placement fails independence however polished it looks.
• Does not count, because it is trivial coverage: funding, hiring, acquisition, launch and earnings announcements; directory and database listings; “best of”, “top 100” and “fastest growing” lists; sponsorships; reports of local events.
• Weak, usually discounted: interviews in which the company mostly speaks about itself, trade-press items, and coverage that circulates only locally.
• Verifies facts, cannot establish notability: annual reports, regulatory filings, patents and other primary documents. They can support a date or a figure once a page exists.
• Not inherited: a famous investor, parent company, founder or customer does not make the company notable. Each entity must stand on coverage about itself.

Owners tend to arrive with a list of impressive facts. None of these creates notability on its own:

• Revenue, growth or profit. A large company with only announcements and listings fails; a small company with three deep independent features can pass.
• Headcount, offices, customer count. These are facts to report once a page exists, never the reason it exists.
• Funding rounds and famous investors. The announcement of a round is trivial coverage, and investors' notability is not inherited.
• Awards. Being listed among winners is a list inclusion. The independent coverage an award generates can count; the listing cannot.
• A well-known founder. The founder may deserve a page; the company needs its own coverage.
• Age, social followers, search ranking. Popularity and notability are different things in Wikipedia's rules.

Numbers belong inside the article after the sources are in place. Before that, they only feel like proof.

Run this on your own company before spending anything. It is deliberately harsh, because it mirrors how a volunteer reviewer reads, not how a marketing team does.

• Minutes 0–3, collect. Search the company name together with your main product and founder names. Check news, books and scholarly results as well as the web. Write down the ten most substantial pieces of coverage.
• Minutes 3–5, strike what you made. Cross out press releases, sponsored content, contributed articles, anything on your own channels, and pieces that repeat a release almost word for word.
• Minutes 5–7, strike the trivial. Cross out funding and launch announcements, listings, directory and database profiles, “top” and “fastest growing” lists, and passing mentions inside articles about something else.
• Minutes 7–9, apply the four tests to whatever is left. Is the company the main subject of several paragraphs? Does the outlet have editors and a correction policy? Did anyone at the company write, commission or pay for it? Is it reporting or analysis rather than a quote from the company?
• Minute 10, tally. Count the survivors that come from at least two different outlets, and check that at least one is not purely local.

A practitioner rule of thumb, not a policy: a few deep sources beat a pile of shallow ones, so three in-depth pieces outweigh twenty passing mentions. The policy sets no fixed number; reviewers judge the quality and independence of the whole set.

• Green: three or more survivors, from different outlets, at least one beyond local reach. A page is realistic. A green self-test means “worth confirming”, not “approved”. The usual blind spot is a source you rate as strong that a reviewer would not, so the next step is a written source audit, then a disclosed submission through Articles for Creation.
• Amber: one or two survivors, or several borderline ones. Not yet. A page attempted now is likely to be declined or challenged, and the record of that stays public. The next step is an audit that names the missing coverage and in which outlets, so the gap can be closed with real reporting.
• Red: nothing survives the four tests. Do not attempt a page. No rewrite of a draft fixes the absence of independent coverage. The next step is to earn that coverage, typically over months rather than weeks, and to test again afterwards.

The notability audit exists for exactly this fork: it is a written go / no-go verdict, source by source, with a deletion-risk rating and a roadmap, and it is allowed to say no. A free 24-hour eligibility check gives a first triage before you commit to the full audit. A “no” that arrives before drafting costs a fraction of a page that is built and then deleted.

A startup is not excluded in principle. In practice it often lacks independent depth, because most early coverage is funding news, launch announcements and listings, all of which fall under trivial coverage. A company that operates in one city needs coverage with at least some regional or wider reach; purely local items are weak.

The best available numbers come from a third-party, non-peer-reviewed audit of 1,009 Articles for Creation drafts from late 2025, reported by the Wikipedia Signpost: 68% were declined, the Business category had the lowest approval rate (about 15%), technology companies about 6%, and the leading reasons were missing notability, missing reliable sources and AI-written text. Treat them as indicative, not as a measured rate for any given company; the full breakdown is on Wikipedia statistics.

On timing, Articles for Creation states that it has no fixed waiting time, and disclosure of a paid or conflicted relationship does not make acceptance more likely or less likely by itself. The same audit reported an average of 30.5 days for completed reviews of accepted drafts. Plan around the sources, not around that average.

Amber and red are not verdicts on the business. They are verdicts on the public record. The productive response is to change the record honestly:

• Earn independent coverage. Original data, expert commentary, customer or industry stories and reporting that journalists choose to write on their own judgment. Paid placements and pay-to-publish platforms do the opposite: they produce material that fails independence and can make the record look manufactured.
• Diversify the outlets. Several outlets with real editorial control and at least one beyond local reach outweigh many items in one place.
• Build the machine-readable layer in the meantime. A clear company page on your own site with consistent facts, and, where the separate Wikidata criteria are met, a referenced Wikidata item. This helps search and AI systems recognize the company without a Wikipedia article. See AI visibility.
• Re-test on a schedule. Repeat the 10-minute test every quarter and keep the list of surviving sources.

Even a green result leaves a second problem. If you own, run or work for the company, or pay someone to act for it, you have a conflict of interest, and Wikipedia's conflict-of-interest guidance strongly discourages editing the subject directly. Paid editors must disclose employer, client and affiliation under the Wikimedia Terms of Use and the paid-contribution disclosure policy, and new articles from conflicted editors are expected to go through Articles for Creation. Undisclosed paid editing is prohibited and is enforced: accounts get blocked, and pages created by blocked accounts can be deleted. Every decline, deletion and block stays in public page histories and logs.

There is also a reasoning problem, which is our argument and not a documented statistic: scoring your own sources honestly is the hardest part of the whole exercise, because the pieces you are proudest of are the ones reviewers discount first. A second pair of experienced eyes is cheapest before a draft exists.

The community's own warning page describes the other danger: unsolicited offers of Wikipedia services are a scam pattern, and anyone promising an outcome is lying about the mechanism (WP:SCAM). The safe route is a disclosed, policy-literate professional who starts with the audit and can tell you no. Hold any vendor, WikiBusines included, to the checklist in how to choose.

Next step: request a notability audit or the free 24-hour eligibility check, or read how engagements run on the official site, wikibusines.net. The process is laid out in process and page creation.