Registered agent
The party a company designates to receive legal service of process, filed with the state.
The registered agent is a textbook dual-nature signal: among the strongest available evidence when the agent is a person connected to the entities, and pure noise when it is a $99/year commercial service. The difference is measurable (how many entities share the address, how they cluster), and the inference machinery treats the two regimes completely differently. Vendors that do not are the ones who “discover” that one office in Albany controls half the state.
What the record actually contains
- The agent
- A person or a commercial service. Commercial agents front thousands of unrelated entities from one address.
- The address
- Where legal papers physically go: someone the controller trusts, or pays.
- Continuity
- The same uncommon agent across entities, over years, is behavioral glue.
Jurisdiction notes
Every US state requires one. New York adds a wrinkle worth knowing: the Secretary of State is the default agent for service, and the company’s “process address”. where the state forwards papers. is often the more revealing field.
Agent and process-address overlap is one of the behavioral signals in control inference, capped and weighted so a commercial agent’s thousand-entity address never manufactures a fake empire.
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