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What are CPV codes and why do keyword alerts fail without them?

CPV (Common Procurement Vocabulary) is the standard EU classification that describes the object of a contract with a numeric code. Every notice above the EU thresholds carries at least one, and Portuguese and Spanish national notices generally do too. Keyword alerts fail because the same object is described in a dozen ways across two languages, while the CPV code stays stable — but CPV alone over-matches, because one code covers work you would never bid for.

Updated 2026-09-11

Why keywords alone are unreliable

A contract for school building energy retrofitting can appear as requalificação energética, eficiencia energética, rehabilitación, or a title that mentions only the school's name. A keyword filter tuned tightly enough to be useful will miss most of these; tuned loosely, it returns the whole feed.

Why CPV alone is also unreliable

CPV codes are assigned by the contracting authority, sometimes carelessly, and a single code can span contracts from twenty thousand to twenty million euros. Filtering on code alone gives a clean but wrong list.

What works

Reading the notice: the object, the technical requirements, the capacity thresholds and the award criteria, together, against a real description of what a company delivers. That is the whole design premise of Sinal.

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