Methodology

Mold Compass is educational. We do not inspect homes, perform remediation, sell legal services, or diagnose health conditions. Our role is to organize source-backed guidance so readers can understand the situation, ask better questions, and know when a qualified professional is needed.

Geographic content standard updated: August 15, 2026.

Source Hierarchy

1. Primary sources first. We prioritize current statutes, official public health guidance, state agency pages, licensing board pages, city and county resources, court materials, legal-aid guidance, and recognized remediation standards.
2. The source must be specific enough for the claim. A department homepage may identify the responsible agency, but it should not be used to prove a detailed legal rule, local flood pattern, complaint process, housing statistic, or health claim that the page does not actually state.
3. Local data in local pages. City and risk pages use city-linked NOAA climate normals, US Census housing data, and official local references where those sources are available in the content files.
4. Plain-English interpretation last. Mold Compass turns source material into checklists, decision points, and planning tools. We avoid treating uncertain legal, health, insurance, or remediation questions as settled.

How State Pages Are Reviewed

Every state page has structured fields for the legal baseline, landlord duties, tenant remedies, repair timing, rent withholding, repair-and-deduct, disclosure, complaint agencies, mold-professional licensing, official sources, legal-aid sources, and practical next steps. Automated checks confirm that all 50 state routes contain the required fields, dates, citations, metadata, and action-oriented content.

Those structural checks do not replace legal research. A substantive state review requires reading the cited statute, regulation, court, agency, or legal-aid material and narrowing the page when a source does not support a stronger conclusion. When the rule is fact-dependent or not clear in the reviewed sources, the page should say limited or unclear rather than manufacture certainty.

How City Pages Are Built

Mold Compass publishes 250 city guides: five cities in each state. A shared page structure keeps navigation and decision support consistent, while each route receives its own city name, state context, climate station, rainfall and humidity indicators, housing-age data where available, local research sources, seasonal risks, inspection priorities, warning signs, and prevention plan.

Programmatic assembly is used for consistency, not to disguise duplicated or unsupported copy as local reporting. City pages must pass checks for required sections, unique metadata, city-specific evidence, source specificity, and known misleading templates. Generic agency homepages and unsupported superlatives are removed from public research cards when more specific support is not present.

Regional climate and housing values are context, not a diagnosis. Annual average temperature is not treated as proof of cooling-season demand, and rainfall or outdoor humidity does not prove that a particular building has mold. A building-level conclusion requires evidence of a moisture source, damp materials, visible growth, recurring odor, or an appropriate inspection.

What Review Dates Mean

• Content updated means the page or content record was revised on that date. It does not automatically mean every linked source was re-read that day.
• Legal sources reviewed means the state legal-source set was substantively reviewed through that date.
• Audit generated means a repository report was regenerated from checked-in content. Generation alone is not a new fact check.
• Live source verification checks whether a cited URL still resolves. A reachable page can still be too general or fail to support a particular sentence, so link availability and claim verification are tracked separately.

How Ask Scout Uses Sources

Ask Scout starts with Mold Compass pages that are already published or checked into the site, including public guides, tools, state pages, and city pages.

When someone asks a question, Ask Scout looks for the most relevant Mold Compass pages and includes source links with the answer. It is a guide to the site and its sources, not a replacement for legal, medical, insurance, or remediation professionals.

Citation Policy

• Legal claims need traceable support. State pages cite statutes, agencies, local code resources, court or legal-aid references, and licensing sources where they support a claim.
• Health and cleanup claims stay tied to official guidance. Health, testing, cleanup, and remediation pages point readers to EPA, CDC/NIOSH, OSHA, WHO, FEMA, and ANSI/IICRC resources where those sources are relevant.
• Uncertainty is labeled. When state law is unclear, a source is limited, or a situation depends on facts not available on the page, we say so instead of filling the gap with certainty.
• Sources are not decorative. A citation should support the adjacent proposition. A related source is not enough when the sentence makes a precise legal, numerical, local, health, or licensing claim.

Review Cadence

Geographic content runs through repository checks whenever relevant files change. A separate scheduled audit tests live state and city source URLs and records redirects, access blocks, dead links, and network errors for follow-up.

Legal and local pages get the strictest treatment because laws, agency pages, complaint systems, assistance programs, and local resources change more often than general mold education.

Correction Standard

If a current authoritative source shows that a page is wrong or out of date, we update the page, narrow the claim, replace the source, or label the issue as uncertain. Corrections should fix the reusable data or page system when the same problem can affect many routes, rather than patching only one visible sentence.

To flag a problem, send the page link, the sentence in question, and the statute, agency page, standard, court material, dataset, or local resource that supports a correction.