The ONS uses glass.ai to understand the trading conditions of businesses in the middle of a pandemic.

One of the many challenges presented by the global Coronavirus pandemic is to understand the impact it has had on businesses and the economy. The normal way of gathering this data has been to use business surveys and analyse responses. However, with the pandemic impacting every walk of life, there has been a — to be expected — knock-on impact on survey response rates. The UK Government’s Office of National Statistics (ONS) Data Science Campus reached out to glass.ai to investigate the use of the open web to provide an alternative source of signals to consider when understanding survey results in the context of business trading status.

During the pandemic, many businesses have updated their websites to give some information on how they are dealing with the restrictions arising from Covid-19. At glass.ai, we have used our web-scale machine reading capability to monitor the home pages of UK businesses and identify any Covid-19 or business operating related notices that appear.

“Almost 14% of UK businesses provide some statement about Covid-19 on their website”.

In addition to reading the Covid-19 notices on websites, glass.ai has an ongoing crawl of business websites which is used to collect further information about each business, such as the description of the business and where it is based. This has enabled over 500,000 businesses to be mapped onto the official business register to enable further analysis. For example, the ONS were able to see the percentage of websites within selected sectors (using SIC codes) that contain Covid-19 related text.

Further language analysis by the ONS was able to categorise statements into various categories, such as the closure of operations, or re-openings to highlight the impact of Covid-19 on different businesses and — by using glass.ai to monitor these characteristics on the changing web — how it changed over time.

The latest studies on the impact of Coronavirus on the UK economy from the ONS have found that survey response rates are very dependent on the industry. It appears that the open web may be able to provide some context to better understand the reasons behind that. Alternative data sources are becoming increasingly important for monitoring national statistics. More so in the current climate where the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic means traditional sources are less reliable.

Looking beyond the high-level notices that appear on websites, glass.ai are now working with the ONS supported Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCoE) to perform a deeper understanding of how companies communicate the impact of Covid-19 on their website, in the news and in their financial reports.