Methodology
How to read anything on this site: what each state means, why some pages do not exist, what money can and cannot change, and what happens when a check gets old.
1. What each state means
Every material statement on a record page is a claim: one narrow assertion about one offering, attached to at least one stored source, carrying how it was checked and when. A record is a set of claims, not a paragraph of prose — which is why a page can tell you that something is unknown instead of quietly omitting it.
How a claim was checked
- unverified
- Not yet checked The statement is present and attributed, and nothing more is asserted.
- source confirmed
- Confirmed against an independent public source
- company confirmed
- Stated by the company Confirmation by a company does not make a claim independently verified — it records who said it.
- editor reviewed
- Reviewed by an ACI editor
- independently verified
- Independently verified
There is no single badge meaning “this company is trustworthy”. A profile-level summary is computed from its claims and never implies that all of them share the highest state.
Whether a check is still current
- current
- Current
- stale
- Stale — past its scheduled recheck
Whether sources disagree
- none
- No known conflict
- possible
- Possible conflict with another source
- confirmed
- Confirmed conflict
- resolved
- Conflict resolved
Whether a claim is public at all
- draft
- Not yet reviewed — withheld from every public surface
- in review
- Under editorial review — withheld from every public surface
- published
- Cleared for publication — the only status shown publicly
- archived
- Withdrawn from publication — withheld from every public surface
A claim in any status other than publishedis withheld from every public surface — the record page, the JSON API, the machine view, and every count the site computes. It is not rendered thin, flagged, or counted as unknown; it is simply not there, in the same way an unpublished page is not there. That is a statement about where the claim is in ACI’s review, not about what the claim itself contains.
When a field has no value
An empty field is a finding, not a blank. Records distinguish ACI has not confirmed this from ACI has confirmed there is none, from the vendor does not disclose this, from not published — quote required. Absence of data is never rendered as a zero, a “no”, or a silently missing row — for any claim that is shown. A claim withheld under the previous heading is the one exception stated here: nothing marks its absence, because nothing about it is on the page for anything to mark.
2. When a page exists, and why some do not
A page is published only when it can answer a real question. Below these thresholds the page does not exist at all — it is not rendered thin, and it is not rendered empty:
- Offering page
- Published only when the record itself meets the publication threshold: enough identified, sourced, dated claims to describe fit and non-fit. An offering that cannot be described honestly is not listed.
- Organization page
- At least 1 published offering.
- Category page
- At least 10 published offerings. A category with fewer is listed on the homepage as closed, with the count that keeps it closed.
- Use-case page
- At least 3 offerings documented against that use case.
- Market page
- At least 5 offerings with confirmed availability in that market. An unknown availability does not count toward it in either direction.
The purpose is blunt: a thin page that exists mainly to be found by a search engine is a page that will mislead whoever finds it.
3. What money can and cannot change
ACI sells the act of checking and the work of maintaining a record. It does not sell position, eligibility, or a verdict.
- Never affected by payment
- Whether an offering is eligible for a situation, its positive and negative fit, its limitations, its unknowns, and the order results appear in. The matching code cannot read commercial state at all — the data it receives has no field for it.
- Labelled where it appears
- Any paid placement is marked as paid at the point it appears, not only in a policy page. See the advertising disclosure.
- What a paid check is
- A bounded piece of work: a stated list of claims, a stated evidence standard per claim, a date, a next review date, and an explicit statement of what was not covered. Paying does not raise a claim’s state; the check either finds support or it does not.
- What is never for sale
- Suppressing a correction, removing a documented limitation, hiding an unknown, or changing where an offering appears in results.
4. Checks expire, visibly
Every claim carries the date it was observed and the date its next review is due. When that date passes, the claim moves to stale on its own and says so on the page — it is not quietly kept looking current, and it is not deleted. A stale claim is still shown, with its original evidence and its age, so a reader can decide what to do with it.
Expiry is a function of the calendar, not of the commercial relationship. A status is never withdrawn for non-payment, and never extended because of payment.
How to dispute any of this
Every claim on every record page is correctable through a visible process, and it applies equally to the company described and to anyone else who spots an error — submit a correction.
Comparison, and what ACI does not do
ACI compares offerings that serve the same need, using characteristics that are material, verifiable, and stated with their source. It does not publish a universal “best”, a leaderboard, a score out of ten, or a winner. Where two offerings differ, the record shows the documented difference and the evidence behind it, and leaves the judgement to the reader whose situation it is.
Pricing
ACI does not publish a price amount for any company, paid or unpaid. What an offering does and who it suits is ACI’s job to document; what it costs is the vendor’s own page to state.
A record can still say how pricing works — per seat, quote required, undisclosed — because an agent needs that to judge whether an offering is worth pursuing further. It will never say how much.
This is a product rule, not a launch-timing decision. Prices move on a schedule ACI’s review cycle cannot match, and a stale published price is the most damaging kind of wrong entry a directory can carry: it misleads whoever is reading it and gives the vendor a legitimate grievance. Not publishing an amount removes that failure mode entirely, for every company, without exception.