Evidence policy

The rule

Verified by GLP Ranked requires a complete review record for the specific claim: a named reviewer, a review date, the source URL the claim was reproduced from, and a SHA-256 checksum of an archived capture that we can re-verify against the file on disk. Anything short of that — including a merely resolvable source URL — does not qualify.

Primary-source-linked means the claim cites an authoritative source (a peer-reviewed trial, a federal register notice, an FDA label) whose URL resolves and whose hostname we've checked, but we have not independently reproduced the specific number or quote against it.

Provider-reported and third-party-reported both mean the figure has a source URL, split by whether that URL's hostname matches the provider's own official domain.

Unverified means no source URL is on file at all. This is the majority of the pricing dataset we inherited.

Why this matters here

This is a compensated-comparison risk category: an inaccurate "verified" badge is not a cosmetic bug, it's a claim someone could rely on to pick a medication provider. Our build fails closed — anything not provably reproduced defaults to a lower status, never a higher one.