Editorial policy

1. Who writes for the site

All long-form editorial content — procedure explainers, specialty primers, FAQ entries — is bylined by Adelinda Manna, who reviews and signs off on every piece before publication. There is no anonymous content. Where AI-assisted drafting is used, the output is reviewed line-by-line against the cited sources before it ships, and citations that cannot be grounded against the live authority-source corpus are dropped automatically by our article validator. Author credentials and external profiles are linked from the byline.

2. How clinics enter the directory

Inclusion is gated by our SpecialistClassifier, which runs on every scraped candidate before it can land on a public surface:

• Tier 0 — Places-type gate. Google Places primary-type and types-array must indicate a veterinary practice. Human-medicine entries and emergency-room facilities are rejected at this gate, even when the name matches a vet-specialty query.
• Tier 1 — name regex. The clinic's display name must match a specialty-specific token AND a veterinary-anchor token. Generic names (e.g. "Athletic Orthopedics") fail this gate.
• Tier 2 — content tokens. The clinic's content corpus must contain at least one board-certification token (DACVS / DACVO / DACVIM / DACVECC / DAVDC, plus board-cert prose variants).
• Operator override. A specialist with a generic name and no board-cert mention can still be included via a JSON specialist_override on the clinic row. Every override is logged. This is the only path around the rules above.
• Generalist fallback. Clinics that pass Tier 0 but fail Tier 1 + Tier 2 are tagged generalist — they appear under a city's general-practice surface but never under a board-cert specialty.

Re-validation runs on a daily rolling pass via our monthly-validator Worker. Operational state, ratings, reviews, and credential tokens are refreshed; clinics that newly fail Tier 0 are removed from active surfaces.

3. How procedure articles are sourced

Each procedure article is built from an editorially-authored brief that lists specialty, body system, urgency, a cost band with explicit basis, contraindications, emergency signals, and a curated list of authority sources (typically ACVS / ACVIM / Merck Veterinary Manual / university veterinary teaching-hospital pages). The brief is git-versioned. The article generator fetches the live authority sources, prompts a structured-output LLM, validates every citation in the output against the source corpus, drops ungrounded citations, and rejects the article entirely if fewer than two citations remain grounded. The grounded citations are then re-rendered as the visible Sources block at the bottom of every article.

Cost bands carry an explicit basis (national-average, regional, single-source) and a disclaimer. We do not invent numbers. If a brief cannot ground a defensible cost band, the band field stays empty and the article ships without a cost callout rather than with a fabricated range.

4. Corrections

If you find an error — wrong credential, misattributed quote, broken citation, an out-of-date clinic listing — email [email protected] with the URL and the specific issue. We acknowledge within 2 business days and ship corrections within 5 business days for factual errors. Corrections to procedure articles update dateModified; substantial changes to a clinic listing trigger a re-classification pass.

Clinic owners who want their listing changed or removed can email the same address. We remove listings on request without litigation, with no exit fee.

5. Conflicts of interest

Founding-member subscribers receive a promoted-listing slot in the rotation surface — they do not receive editorial favour in procedure articles, specialty primers, or the SpecialistClassifier gate. The classifier code is operator-policed; if a promoted clinic later fails Tier 0 on re-validation, it loses the promoted slot. The clinic-finder ranking on procedure pages weights distance and aggregated rating, not subscription status.

6. AI & agent disclosures

We use large language models for first-pass drafting of procedure articles and for clinic-summary generation. Every machine-generated piece is reviewed by a named human before publication. The site publishes a machine-readable llms.txt for AI crawlers and exposes structured data on every page; future revisions will publish an /.well-known/agent-actions.json manifest for action-capable agents.

7. Contact

Corrections, suggestions, complaints: [email protected]. Business-model questions: see our business-model disclosure. Verification questions: see our verification process.