Plumbline / methodology
Every record comes from an official licensing authority: the state boards and city licensing departments that publish their contractor rosters as public data. The homepage lists each covered jurisdiction with its issuing agencies and latest snapshot date. We fetch only public data, identify ourselves to every source (a named crawler carrying a contact address), and rate-limit our requests.
Most jurisdictions are re-fetched daily; a few boards run on their own nightly or weekly windows. Every page and API answer cites the snapshot date of the exact roster file its record came from, so staleness is visible per record. A freshness watchdog runs hourly and alerts us when any source goes more than 36 hours stale; a daily integrity scrub re-hashes every archived file. The issuing agency's live page is authoritative for today.
Each fetched file goes into a write-once, content-addressed archive: stored under its sha256, never modified. Every contractor page cites the sha256 of the source file its record was read from, and the row within it, so any fact here can be traced back to the exact bytes the agency published.
Boards publish statuses in their own vocabularies. We always show the verbatim source status and, alongside it, a normalized status (active, inactive, suspended, revoked) so records can be compared across states. The badge summarizes the sourced record below it; it never replaces it.
When successive snapshots of a roster differ for a license (a record appears, disappears, or changes status or expiration), we record the change and show it on the record's page with the date we observed it. Each history states the date our archive began observing that source; we never render history we did not observe, and an entity with no observed changes gets no fabricated "no changes" section.
Ratings, rankings, recommendations, and dossiers. A page is one occupational-license record as the board publishes it: no aggregation across sources about a person, no characterization, and never for any FCRA purpose (employment, tenant, credit, or insurance screening). A "no records found" is never a determination that a contractor is unlicensed.
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