What happens when you index a 160-page consulting report

McKinsey's annual M&A Trends report is one of the most widely circulated documents in corporate dealmaking. The 2026 edition runs 160 pages. It covers 12 industry sectors across three continents, cites dozens of named transactions, references regulatory actions from multiple governments, and weaves together macroeconomic data, executive surveys, and strategic frameworks.

It's the kind of document that everyone downloads and few people fully absorb.

Not because it's poorly written — it isn't. McKinsey's M&A practice produces rigorous, well-organized research. The problem is structural. A 160-page PDF is a linear medium applied to a non-linear subject. The report's value isn't in reading it front to back. It's in the connections between its parts: the deal that illustrates a trend, the regulatory shift that explains a sector's momentum, the figure buried in one chapter that reframes the thesis of another.

That's exactly the kind of problem an index solves.

The report at a glance

The 2026 edition of M&A Trends: Navigating a rapidly rebounding market documents a year in which global M&A activity surged 43 percent to $4.7 trillion in deal value. It covers:

• Regional analysis across the Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Europe/Middle East/Africa
• 12 industry deep dives: advanced industries, defense, consumer packaged goods, financial services, global energy and materials, insurance, life sciences, private capital, travel and logistics, US healthcare, TMT, and technology M&A
• Strategic insights on M&A capability building, synergy capture, integration design, communications, separations, dual-track processes, and Gen AI's role in dealmaking
• Named transactions including Union Pacific's $89.5 billion acquisition of Norfolk Southern, along with dozens of other deals cited across sectors
• Regulatory developments from the DOJ, FTC, FDIC, Federal Reserve, and state-level agencies
• Data exhibits with charts covering deal value, volume, sector breakdowns, cross-regional flows, and valuation multiples

The table of contents alone spans a full page with entries starting at page 3 and running through page 155. There are named authors, named executives, named companies, named regulators, and named policies scattered across every chapter.

What an index reveals

When we fed the McKinsey report into Fast Facts, the platform extracted and organized the key terms, entities, and concepts across all 160 pages — then mapped how they relate to each other.

The result is a structured, searchable index where every term links back to the specific passages where it appears. Instead of scanning chapters hoping to relocate a statistic, you search for it directly.

Here's what that looks like in practice:

We used the following custom instruction to guide the index:

Extract named transactions and deal values, acquiring and target companies, industry sectors, geographic regions, regulatory bodies and policy actions, named individuals (authors, analysts, executives cited), financial metrics (deal value, multiples, percentages, hold times), and strategic concepts (portfolio streamlining, arena industries, divestitures, activist campaigns, synergy capture). Prioritize terms that appear across multiple chapters so the index reveals cross-cutting themes.

Names become navigable

The report references dozens of individuals — from McKinsey partners and senior analysts to external sources like journalists, regulators, and academics. In a flat PDF, these names appear once and disappear into the text. In an index, they become entry points. You can see everyone mentioned in the report, where they appear, and what context surrounds each mention.

Jake Henry and Mieke Van Oostende, the global coleaders of McKinsey's M&A Practice, signed the foreword. But the report also cites Nick Lichtenberg of Fortune on activist investors, Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times on PE legislation, and Pete Schroeder of Reuters on FDIC policy changes. Each of these names carries a thread you might want to follow — and an index lets you pull it instantly.

Transactions become traceable

The report names specific deals throughout. Union Pacific's agreement to acquire Norfolk Southern for $89.5 billion. A $39 billion take-private in Japan. Ten deals exceeding $30 billion in 2025, up from four the prior year. These transactions are sprinkled across different chapters depending on whether the discussion is regional, sectoral, or thematic.

An index collapses that fragmentation. Search for a company name and you see every context in which it appears — the regional analysis, the sector deep dive, the integration insight — all in one view. For anyone conducting due diligence or competitive intelligence, that cross-referencing is the whole point.

Figures become findable

Dense research reports are valuable because of their data. But data that you can't relocate is data you can't use. This report is packed with specific numbers:

• $4.7 trillion in global deal value, up 43%
• 60 deals clearing the $10 billion mark
• $2.2 trillion in accumulated PE dry powder
• $1.6 trillion in divestitures, a post-2021 high
• 6.2-year average PE hold times, up from 4.0 years in 2009
• Arena industries accounting for 40% of deal value, up from 7% in 2005

In the PDF, these figures live in specific paragraphs you'd need to remember or bookmark. In an index, they're anchored to their terms and retrievable on demand.

Themes become visible

Perhaps the most valuable output of indexing a document like this is the ability to see its thematic structure at a glance. The report covers several interlocking themes — portfolio streamlining, activist investor pressure, the rise of "arena" industries, Gen AI's impact on deal execution — but these themes don't stay neatly inside their assigned chapters. They recur, overlap, and build on each other across the full 160 pages.

An index surfaces that connective tissue. It shows you that "activist investors" appears not just in the divestitures section but also in the context of board composition and settlement strategies. It shows you that "AI" isn't confined to the Gen AI chapter — it appears in the context of deal valuations, TMT sector dominance, PE target selection, and capability-led acquisitions.

The index doesn't interpret the report. It exposes the structure that's already there.

Beyond legal: why this matters for business

Fast Facts was built for legal professionals — lawyers preparing for depositions, paralegals organizing discovery, pro se litigants assembling evidence. But a consulting report like McKinsey's M&A Trends shares a fundamental property with a legal document set: it's a dense collection of facts, names, relationships, and assertions that becomes exponentially more useful when you can navigate it by concept rather than by page number.

Consider who reads a report like this and what they're actually looking for:

• A private equity associate preparing for an investment committee meeting needs every reference to PE deal activity, hold times, and dry powder — pulled from the six different chapters where those figures appear
• A corporate development lead evaluating a potential acquisition in advanced industries wants to know what the report says about that sector specifically, including deal multiples, geographic patterns, and competitive dynamics
• An M&A attorney advising on a cross-border transaction needs the regulatory landscape across multiple jurisdictions — FDIC rulings, DOJ enforcement posture, state-level premerger notification requirements, and EMEA/APAC policy changes — stitched together from sections that the report separates by geography
• A board member preparing for a strategy session wants the executive-level trends without re-reading 160 pages, but also wants the ability to drill into any claim with a single click

In each case, the need isn't to read the report. It's to search it, cross-reference it, and extract the specific information that matters for a particular decision.

How it works

Fast Facts processes the full document — all 160 pages — and identifies the entities, concepts, figures, and relationships within it. The platform then generates a structured index where every extracted term links directly back to its source context.

There's no summarization. No paraphrasing. No editorial interpretation. The index is a navigational layer over the original text. When you click a term, you see the exact passages where it appears, preserving the author's language and the surrounding context.

For a report this size, the result is typically thousands of indexed terms organized into a searchable, browsable structure. You can filter by type (people, organizations, figures, concepts), search for specific terms, or simply scan the index to understand the document's scope before diving into any section.

The broader principle

Consulting reports, research papers, regulatory filings, earnings transcripts, government releases — these documents share a common challenge. They're written to be read linearly, but they're used non-linearly. The person who needs page 87 rarely arrived there by reading pages 1 through 86.

An index bridges that gap. It treats the document not as a narrative to be consumed but as a body of knowledge to be navigated. And the denser the document, the more valuable that navigation becomes.

McKinsey's 2026 M&A Trends report is a good example precisely because it's well-made. The challenge isn't quality — it's volume and complexity. An index doesn't improve the research. It makes the research accessible in the way that professionals actually need to use it.

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