Methodology v6
MajorCurrentLegitimacy & Accreditation becomes scored-with-disclosure: where third-party evidence exists it scores at full Critical weight, and where it does not the page states what we searched and that we could not establish it. The factor is NOT re-tiered — it remains Critical.
Impact on live scores
Yes — live provider scores were recomputed under this version.
Why we made this change
A Critical factor that no obtainable evidence can satisfy is a specification error, not a standard. The evidence path was measured rather than assumed, and for a meaningful share of providers there is no third-party record that answers it. Telling a reader what we searched and could not establish is more informative than a page that cannot publish at all.
The full rationale
Two things are true about this change, and neither is offered as the reason for the other.
FIRST — why it is CORRECT: the evidence path was measured and found unobtainable for a meaningful share of providers. The 2026-08-25 government-source design read six .gov hosts and found three do not permit us; there is no register, federal or otherwise, that answers whether an operation is licensed in every state it ships to; the one federal single-API source (NPPES) carries provider self-reports rather than licensure status, and is blocked by domain inheritance in any case; and for some providers the bridge from a brand to a named legal entity does not exist in any third-party record at all. A factor that no obtainable evidence can satisfy is a specification error, not a standard.
SECOND — why it is NOW: seven of fourteen live scored units cannot be published while this factor blocks, so the corpus cannot be kept current. That is a real reason and it is not the same reason as the first. It would not on its own justify the change; the first would justify it whenever it was made.
AND WHAT THIS IS NOT: it is not a re-tiering. Legitimacy & Accreditation remains Critical, at full Critical weight, and where third-party evidence exists it scores exactly as it did before. The published tier is our statement of how much a factor matters, and we still think this one matters most. What changed is only what happens when it cannot be established: the page states what we searched and that we could not establish it, instead of the score being unpublishable and the reader seeing nothing.
HOW IT INTERACTS WITH MISSING DATA: an unresolved disclosed factor leaves the Critical/High completeness denominator, which is the rule published in v2 — third-party data we cannot retrieve is excluded and the score re-normalized over what was assessed, so a provider is never penalised for OUR retrieval gap. Genuine provider opacity still scores low. Overall completeness is unchanged, so the gap is still reported to the reader.