Can web search snippets map China's hidden supply chains better than official filings?

Official supply chain data in China is sparse, especially for unlisted firms and minor business relationships. This work extracts supplier-customer links from web search snippets—the summaries returned with Google results—feeding them to LLMs for relationship extraction. The method finds nearly 10 times more connections than disclosure databases while being far cheaper than processing full web pages, revealing that Chinese firm networks follow heavy-tailed distributions typical of real supply chains.