Source hierarchy
- Responsible local office: assessor, property appraiser, appraisal district, auditor, revenue office or other official assessment authority.
- Official related office: collector, treasurer, recorder, clerk, appeal board, state tax authority or official GIS department.
- Official documents: forms, notices, regulations, instructions, data dictionaries, annual reports and government-hosted PDFs.
- Authorized public portal: a search or payment system linked by the responsible government office.
- Reliable secondary source: used to cross-check a field that is missing or temporarily unavailable.
- Competitor fallback: used only to avoid leaving a useful field blank when higher-priority sources cannot be found; the internal status remains Competitor Sourced unless independently confirmed.
Field-level verification
Verification is performed by field, not by page. A phone number can be officially verified while a deadline on the same page remains secondary-sourced. The content record stores the field name, status, destination URL and date checked. Public pages display the source index so a user or AI system can connect claims with evidence.
An official link is accepted only after its destination is checked for the responsible organization and task. A third-party payment processor is not labeled as the government office. A link found on a competitor page is opened and inspected before it is presented as an official destination.
Deadline and current-year information
Assessment appeal and exemption deadlines can be fixed dates, notice-based windows, mailing-based deadlines or jurisdiction-specific schedules. A general annual date is not substituted for the date printed on a current notice. Time-sensitive statements include the applicable year or explain that the notice controls.
If an official deadline cannot be confirmed, the page states the source limitation and directs the user to the responsible appeal office. Unconfirmed deadlines are not silently loaded into a calculator. The appeal planner calculates only from a window entered by the user after checking the current official rule.
Content production process
- Create the locality data sheet and identify the state-specific office terminology.
- Open and record the assessment, search, GIS, collector, recorder, appeal and exemption destinations.
- Document the portal’s search modes, identifiers and known workflow differences.
- Write direct answers and local instructions without copying source wording.
- Add claim-level source notes, direct FAQs and a revision record.
- Run publication, duplication, title, link, schema, accessibility and mobile checks.
- Keep weak or incomplete pages out of the sitemap until the quality gate passes.
Source-status labels
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Official Verified | The field is confirmed on a responsible government source or authorized portal. |
| Secondary Verified | At least two reliable non-official sources agree, but an official confirmation was not available. |
| Competitor Sourced | The value came from a competitor and has not been independently confirmed. |
| Needs Review | The field is incomplete, conflicting, stale or otherwise unsuitable for a confident statement. |
| Broken | The destination or field no longer works and must not be treated as current. |
Freshness and revision handling
The factual field-review date, content-modification date and publication date are separate. Sitemaps use actual modification dates rather than automatically claiming that every page changed today. A page can be editorially restructured without claiming that every government field was reverified on the same date.
Correction reports are compared with the responsible source. When a field changes, the record can preserve the prior value, new value, source and review date. Pages include a visible contact route for reporting changes.