Discover all companies connected to the target through shared board members.

This is the key differentiator of this API: starting from one company, you can see every other company that shares at least one current director, revealing hidden governance links and corporate group structures.

• connections - each connected company with the list of shared director names
• connection_strength - number of shared directors (higher = stronger link)
• truncated - true if depth=2 traversal hit the 30-company cap (see below)
• Results are sorted by connection strength (strongest first)

Only genuine board directors contribute to connections - corporate secretaries (e.g. a company secretarial provider shared by thousands of client companies) are excluded, so a shared corporate-secretary provider never creates a phantom "connection" between otherwise unrelated companies.

Depth 1 (default): direct connections only - companies sharing a director with the target. Depth 2: also traverses each connected company's directors to find second-degree connections. This reveals wider networks but is upstream-intensive on cold cache.

Data is cached for 30 days (cache key includes depth). If the Companies House API is down, stale cached data is returned with cached: true.

Plan gating: depth=2 requires a Pro or Enterprise plan (403 for Free/Web). depth=1 is available on all plans.

Example: /v1/company/00445790/network?depth=1 shows companies connected to Tesco PLC.

---

Upstream usage: This is the most upstream-intensive endpoint.

• Depth 1 (cold cache): same as /directors - ~N+2 upstream calls, where N is the number of directors. A 10-director company uses ~12 calls; a 50-director company uses ~52 calls. After first fetch, cached for 30 days at no cost.

• Depth 2 (cold cache): traverses each connected company's directors as well. To protect service quality for all customers, traversal is capped at 30 connected companies per request. Typical upstream cost: 50–200 calls. If the cap is hit, the response includes truncated: true and truncated_at: 30 - this means more connections exist but were not explored.

Practical guidance: Depth=2 on cold cache is slow by design. On a warm cache (after the first request), depth=2 is instant and free. If you need depth=2 across many companies, call /directors for each first to warm the cache, then request the network.

At high volume, querying more than ~8 different companies per minute at depth=1 or more than 2–3 different companies per 5 minutes at depth=2 on cold cache will cause responses to slow while upstream capacity recovers.

{
  "cache_age_seconds": 3421,
  "cached": true,
  "credits_remaining": 487,
  "credits_used": 1,
  "data": {
    "company_age_years": 78,
    "company_name": "TESCO PLC",
    "company_number": "00445790",
    "company_status": "active",
    "company_type": "plc"
  },
  "data_source": "cached",
  "status": "success"
}