THE FIRST WORDS OF A DEBARRED COMPANY'S NAME
Aervik Labs — measured 2026-09-19
https://aerviklabs.com/research/samgov-leading-tokens-2026/

WHAT THIS IS
For 18787 company records on the U.S. federal exclusions list, a count of the word each
name starts with, and of the first two words together.

THE FINDING
7198 distinct leading words across the list, and yet the top 10 cover 18.3% of it.
"limited liability" starts 1133 records (6%) and "joint stock" 724 (3.9%).
Roughly one company in eight begins with a legal form rather than a distinctive name,
which is why any matching strategy weighted toward the front of a name concentrates
badly on this list.

FILES
  leading-tokens.csv  leading_token, records, pct_of_list — every distinct first word
  leading-pairs.csv   first_two_words, records, pct_of_list — pairs occurring twice or more
  summary.json        the aggregates the published page prints
  README.txt          this file

WHAT IS NOT HERE, DELIBERATELY
No company names. These files are token counts only.

SCOPE AND ITS REASON
18787 records, being those the source classifies "business" and dates on or after
2022-04-04. SAM.gov's Terms place Legal Business Name inside "D&B Open Data" for exclusion records created before that date, with no bulk use. Those records are excluded from this study entirely.
Records the source classifies as individuals are not read, counted or included.

SOURCE
SAM.gov Entity Exclusions, U.S. General Services Administration. Names normalised with a production matcher before
the first word was taken, so "Limited Liability Company" and "LIMITED-LIABILITY COMPANY"
count as the same leading words.

LICENCE
This derived dataset is published under CC BY 4.0. Attribution: Aervik Labs.

CORRECTIONS
Errors are corrected on the published page with the date and what changed, and noted in
the changelog at https://aerviklabs.com/changelog/.