MAP Verified™
Publisher Verification
MAP Verified™ publisher status is earned — not purchased. Publishers who meet MAP's standards receive a publicly accessible verification record. Earned through documented standards. Not purchased. No publisher has been certified yet.
Verification is conducted manually by MAP's founder, who reviews each application against MAP's seven observable dimensions — Origin, Attribution, Specificity, Timing, Framing, Context Change, and Information Relationships. No commercial relationship influences the outcome.
Publisher certification is a manual process, decided by MAP's founder, separate from automated MAP Context Records. Certification evaluates documented publishing practices under MAP's published standards; it is not a numeric credibility score and does not certify every statement published by the organization as true.
Eligibility
Active publication — at least 90 days of continuous published content available for review
Publicly identified ownership, editorial contact, and corrections policy
Content primarily in English (international publishers: English-language section reviewed)
No active legal finding of systematic defamation or deliberate disinformation at time of application
The verification process
What is live today
Status block last checked October 4, 2026.
This section describes the program as MAP runs it now. Anything that has not been built is listed under Not yet available.
Application: available. Applications are free. The form below collects the publisher name, domain, business category, a contact name and email, and optional notes.
Review: available, manual. MAP's founder checks the eligibility conditions above and reviews a sample of your recent content against the seven observable dimensions. This is the judgment of one person. It does not produce a score, a number or a ranking. For any one page a dimension can report little or nothing; Context Change, for example, can be reported only for a URL MAP has observed more than once.
Decision: available, manual. The founder approves or declines each application. Nothing is approved automatically: the only step that creates a certification entry is the founder approving an application by hand.
Public record: built, not yet used for a real application. Approval is designed to write one entry to the MAP Verification Ledger with the publisher name, domain, business category and date. The entry is designed to be SHA-256 hash-chained and append-oriented, and to be listed in the Certified Publishers tab of the Verification Archive and in the public list at /wp-json/map/v1/ledger/publishers. This step has not run for a real application. Both lists are empty as of October 4, 2026.
MAP does not yet publish the data needed to recompute the hashes, so readers cannot yet check the chain for themselves; for now they rely on MAP's own daily report.
Continuity check: MAP runs a continuity check on the ledger every day (last run Nov 7, 2026 10:01 UTC). MAP does not publish its detailed results or the data needed to recompute the hashes.
Not yet available
None of the following is available to the public today. MAP has not set a date for any of it.
A page for each certified publisher. Not yet available. Certification entries are listed in the Verification Archive and in the public list described above.
A badge image for a certified publisher's own site. Not yet available.
An embed snippet. Not yet available.
A fixed number of URLs reviewed per application. Not yet defined. Today MAP's founder reviews a sample of recent content.
Renewal, re-review and withdrawal. Renewal and re-review: not defined. Withdrawal: an admin action exists in the code and has not been used.
What a certification is not
A certification record documents that MAP reviewed a publisher's documented practices on a date. It is not a rating or score, and it does not mean that what the publisher publishes is true.
Apply for publisher verification
Applications are free. MAP aims to review them in the order received; there is no guaranteed response time.