Every fact traces to one of three tiers.
Groundcheck publishes determinations about real, named businesses — a licence status, a state-filing standing, a permit history. That is a real-world claim, and we treat it like one. Nothing on a Groundcheck report is a guess presented as a fact. The three tiers below are how a determination gets made; a report shows you the sources it searched, an overall confidence level, and the date it was compiled.
The three evidence tiers
Listed strongest to weakest. A report never claims a stronger tier than the evidence it actually has.
These tiers describe our method, not a badge printed beside each line. A report today shows the sources it searched, one overall confidence level, and the date it was compiled — not a separate tier label and date per finding.
Structured-verified
StrongestMatched directly against a state licence roster, Secretary-of-State filing, or permit record that we have already ingested into our own database. This is deterministic: we hold the record, we matched the named business to it, and the answer comes from that row, not from a search result.
Example: “Active — California CSLB licence #XXXXXX, verified against the CSLB roster, as of 2026-08-09.”
Retrieval-verified
Weaker, but realUsed when a state has no ingested roster we hold locally. We run a live public web search (via a retrieval provider) and cite a matching official record if one comes back. Every retrieval-verified fact carries the source URL we found it at and the timestamp of that search. It is weaker than Tier 1 because it depends on a live lookup instead of a corpus we control end-to-end — but it is a cited, checkable record, never a paraphrase or an inference.
Example: “Licence board record found via web search — [source URL] — retrieved 2026-08-11T14:02Z.”
No-record (honest absence)
A feature, not a bugWhen we have no ingested data for that state andthe live search returns nothing, we report exactly that: “no record found.” We do not fill that gap with an inference, and we never treat absence of a record as evidence of wrongdoing. An honest “we don’t have this” is the correct output — not a defect to be papered over with a guess.
When “no record” is the right answer
The clearest case: 17 US states and DC have no statewide general-contractor licence at all.
A general-contractor licence check can only return “no record” honestly in a state that actually issues one. In the states below, there is no statewide general-contractor credential to hold — construction is licensed municipally (a city or county permit office), or not licensed as a distinct trade at the state level at all. A Groundcheck report for a contractor in one of these states will say so plainly, and will never present the absence of a state licence as a red flag.
No statewide general-contractor licence required — verify with the local municipality instead. Sourced live from the same table our scoring engine reads (gc_state_license_required), not hand-typed here.
Outside that list, a “no record found” result means exactly what it says: neither our ingested corpus nor a live retrieval attempt turned up a matching licence, filing, or permit — not that one doesn’t exist, and not that the business is doing anything wrong.
As of — every datum has a clock on it
“We already have this data” is not the same as “this data is current.” Public records go stale — a licence renews, a filing lapses, a permit closes out — and presenting an old snapshot as if it were today’s status is the single biggest accuracy risk in what we publish.
That is why every fact on a Groundcheck report carries a verified-as-of timestamp: the date we last confirmed it against the source, whether that source is our own ingested corpus or a live retrieval. We do not average away staleness, and we do not let an old corpus pose as a live check. If a corpus has gone stale, the report says so instead of silently continuing to serve it as current.
Not FCRA, and not a background check
Groundcheck does not run background checks, and it does not perform criminal, credit, or employment screening on people. It is not a Consumer Reporting Agency, and the Fair Credit Reporting Act does not apply to what it does: verifying the public standing of a registered business entity — an LLC, corporation, or partnership — not a person.
What we check
Licence status, Secretary-of-State filing standing, permit history, and other public-record signals about a named business, sourced the way this page describes.
What we don’t do
Individual credit history, criminal background checks, or employment screening on a person. Requests that are actually about vetting an individual are declined, not quietly answered anyway.
If you believe something published about a business is inaccurate, every Groundcheck report page includes a direct dispute link for that specific business, reviewed by a person — not an automated correction. For anything else about this methodology, or if you can’t locate a report’s dispute link, reach us directly at trust@earthmove.io.
The full FCRA scope explanation, including how we handle requests that turn out to be about a person, lives at /trust/fcra.
See it on a real report.
Run a free Groundcheck on any contractor and see the evidence tier behind every line — not just the verdict.