Pursuit Checks Who You're Bidding With, and Tells You What It Missed

The invite lands on a Friday and it looks like a good job. Right scope, right size, a bid date you can actually hit. What you do not know, and will not find out until it is too late to matter, is anything about the company on the other end of it.

Whether they pay their subs in 30 days or 90. Whether there is a bankruptcy in the file. Whether the vendor quoting you the cheapest machine in town has a yard and a fleet, or just a website and a phone number. Almost nobody checks, because checking means SAM.gov, then PACER, then OSHA's enforcement database, then Google, and you have a bid due Tuesday.

The seven-minute version

Why nobody runs the check

It is not laziness. The information exists, but it is scattered across half a dozen systems that were never built to be read together. Federal debarment lives on SAM.gov. Bankruptcy and federal litigation live in PACER. Safety history lives in a Department of Labor dataset. Reputation lives in Google and the Better Business Bureau. Mechanic's liens live with a county recorder and are often not online at all. Pulling all of that on one vendor is an afternoon. Doing it for every vendor and every GC on every bid is a job nobody has.

How it works

1. Add the vendor or customer. Give it the name, the address, and the website if you have one. The more you give it, the better it does. With only a name it can confuse a company in Hawaii with a same-named company in Washington.

2. Read the score. Every company carries one number, a weighted average of five categories: Business Legitimacy at 25 percent, Reputation at 25, Legal History at 20, Financial Health at 15, and Payment Reliability at 15. The score rides the list, so you see it before you open anything.

3. Open a category. Each one expands to the reasoning behind it, not just the number. A 3.9-star Google average and what the reviews actually say. A federal court hit, and whether it involves this company or a same-named one three states away.

4. Check the sources. Every report ends with what was searched: Google-grounded web search, SAM.gov federal registration and debarment, federal court dockets including bankruptcy, and OSHA enforcement records. You can take the number on faith, or you can scroll down and see where it came from.

The customer report runs the same engine pointed at a different question. On a vendor you are asking whether they are real and whether they can perform. On a customer you are asking whether they pay, so liens, payment disputes, and financial distress carry more of the weight.

What it tells you it could not see

Every report also prints its own blind spots. Mechanic's liens are filed with county recorders and are not reliably searchable online, so "no liens found" is not proof of a clean lien record. A title or lien search service is what gives you certainty there. Most state and county court records are not indexed by web search, so only federal cases were checked against docket records. Dun & Bradstreet and Experian Business trade-payment data is not accessible to us, so payment-reliability signals come from public records and news, not from a credit file.

That matters most in the direction people get backwards. A low score usually means the AI found less, not that it found something bad. A good small contractor with no website and no federal work will score lower than their record deserves. Open the report and read the reasoning before you draw a conclusion. This is a second glance, not a verdict.

Try it on your next RFQ

Vendor and Customer Intelligence is part of Pursuit, our AI-powered CRM and bid management tool, and it is included in the Pro+ Intelligence plan. You can see how the report is put together, then add a company you are looking at right now and see what comes back. If it catches one outfit you should not have bid, it has paid for the minute it took to run.