Methodology

1. Finding MSPs

We start from public lists of candidate businesses: Google Maps searches for “managed IT services”, “managed service provider” and “IT support company” across US and UK towns and cities, and UK Companies House companies with IT SIC codes matched to a website. So far: pilot (2026-11-07): 487 candidates, 320 kept; seed (2026-11-07): 44,928 candidates, 10,555 kept; w1 (2026-11-08): 1,500 candidates, 1,493 kept; expand (2026-11-08): 23,815 candidates, 1,652 kept; w2 (2026-11-08): 3,000 candidates, 2,931 kept.

2. What counts as an MSP

A business that sells recurring managed IT services to business clients (monitoring, help desk, security, cloud) under an ongoing agreement. We leave out break-fix-only shops, consumer computer repair, online resellers, software vendors, staffing firms, telecoms and ISPs, web agencies and enterprise integrators. Each candidate we leave out is logged with the reason.

3. Profiles

• Basic pass: home, about/services and contact pages: identity, services, positioning and size where shown.
• Full pass: adds industry pages, case studies, partner and technology pages, support pages, security/compliance pages, awards, public DNS and Companies House.

4. Fields

• Services: listed on their own pages (13 groups, from help desk to AI services).
• Industries served: they have an industry page or section for it, or a case study in it. A word on the home page is not enough.
• Stack: partner badge, their own pages or public DNS; tools in “we replace X” or comparison copy do not count. Tools named only in job ads are not listed. “Datto”, “ConnectWise” or “Kaseya” without a product is shown as the vendor only.
• Support hours: “24/7” only when tied to support, the help desk, engineers or an emergency line; “24/7 monitoring” is shown separately. Business or extended hours only when they publish the hours.
• Size: the staff count they publish; else the size band on their own LinkedIn page.
• Pricing: per-user or per-device prices they publish for their own managed service, as written (currency, VAT, “from”). Licence, phone, hourly, add-on prices and market estimates are left out.
• Ownership: acquisitions, mergers, private-equity backing or group membership the MSP reports on its own site, and for UK companies the corporate parent on the Companies House register (companies only, never individuals).
• Outsourcing: what the MSP says about its own help desk, NOC or SOC: that it uses an outsourced or partner desk, that it sells white-label services to other MSPs, or that it does not outsource.
• Certifications: Microsoft and vendor partner designations shown on their site; their own SOC 2, ISO 27001 or Cyber Essentials only when they say they hold it (helping clients achieve it is a compliance service, not their certificate).

5. Publish gate

A profile is offered to search engines only when it has at least six sourced facts beyond name, address and website, from at least three groups (for example three services, two industries and one tool). Thinner profiles stay reachable from lists, marked as basic, until a later wave fills them in. City pages appear only when at least five profiles there pass the gate.

6. Limits

• Coverage follows what is findable: MSPs visible on Google Maps and with a readable website are over-represented. Sites that block crawlers or need JavaScript to show text are left out until a later wave.
• Everything is as published: a 24/7 promise is the MSP’s claim, not our measurement.
• Pattern matching can misread a page. Every fact links to its source so you can check it, and MSPs can correct their profile.