Introduction
Company-Histories.com is a reference site: how thousands of businesses actually started, the eras they grew up in, and increasingly, how you might build something similar today.
It's been running since 2012 and has grown into 7,073 company profiles, built from source citations, key dates, and founder and principal records. No staff, no editorial team, no ad sales. I run it myself, and this year rebuilt the front end into its current dark, answer-engine-friendly design.
How it's built
Everything renders from a single SQLite database (146MB, tracked in Git LFS) with tables for companies, citations, key dates, principal blocks, industry codes, and a standing link-audit log that checks source citations stay live.
A Python pipeline parses source material into that database, an AI-assisted step drafts the "build it today" angle for each company, and a generator renders the whole thing out: roughly 10,483 static pages, one per company plus industry and country hubs.
The numbers
Who reads it
The site is built to be read by answer engines as much as by people. It stays open to Googlebot, Bingbot, and the AI answer crawlers like PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot, and ClaudeBot. The block-list is reserved for aggressive commercial scrapers, not the bots that actually send readers here.
Tools
Future
- Keep the citation base live and current as the link-audit log flags rot.
- Keep adding company profiles as new source material gets documented.