How LiveScanMap builds its listings
Every listing on this site is the merge of three streams: an authoritative state or state-partner list; data we derive ourselves (coordinates, parsed opening hours, verification status); and, for claimed listings, a set of edits made by the business owner and audit-logged against the state record they replace.
This page states, field by field, which stream fills which value, how often each stream re-runs, and what happens when a source or a reader tells us something is wrong.
The pipeline, top to bottom
- Weekly scrape. A scheduled job reads the state source for each launched state — for California, the DOJ's approved-provider list — and writes a normalised JSON snapshot. States we haven't launched are loaded to the same schema for testing and stay behind
noindexuntil the launch bar in our growth plan is met. - Overrides. Editorial corrections captured in
data/overrides.jsonare applied on top of the scrape — an override can supply an address the state left null, correct a mis-parsed city, or attach a website URL we've confirmed by phone match. Every override carries asourcefield that names how each value was corroborated (e.g., "Yelp + MapQuest + phone match"). - Geocoding. State sources rarely publish coordinates. We geocode addresses through the US Census MAF/TIGER batch endpoint and fall through to per-vendor coordinates for the small number of rows Census can't resolve. Rows that fail both fall to an admin queue and don't appear on the map until they resolve on a later pass — they still appear on the county page and in the directory.
- Verification. Where a listing publishes a website we fetch it and cross-check the phone number. A domain that loads and prints a matching phone earns the site link; a domain that loads but shows a different phone is kept in the record but not attached to the listing (the state may have the wrong URL for that business). Details in the section below.
- Owner edits. A business owner who verifies control of a listing can edit its hours, walk-in policy, prices, languages, and booking link. Every owner edit is diffed against the state record and audit-logged; the state record stays visible so a reversal is trivial if a claim is later disputed.
- Publish. Static pages are rebuilt from the merged snapshot; sitemap and IndexNow submissions run against the diff so search engines only re-crawl what actually changed.
Per-field provenance
| Field | Primary source | Refresh cadence | Owner can edit? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Business name, address, phone | State list (fallback: override) | Weekly | Yes, with audit log |
| Rolling fee | State list; provider-set, drifts often | Weekly | Yes |
| Opening hours | State list, parsed to structured form | Weekly | Yes |
| Walk-in / appointment | State list | Weekly | Yes |
| Payment methods, languages | State list | Weekly | Yes |
| Coordinates (map pin) | Derived: Census MAF/TIGER geocoder | On address change | No (re-derived from address) |
| Website URL | State list, filtered by phone-match verification | Monthly re-verification | Yes (owner claim overrides) |
| Verified-owner badge, booking link | Owner claim, magic-link authenticated | On owner edit | Yes |
| Derived stats (county medians, price percentile) | Computed from the merged snapshot | Every publish | No |
Verification
A listing's website URL is attached only after a phone match: we fetch the site and confirm the phone number the state has on file appears somewhere on the page. Sites that load but publish a different phone number are recorded as site loads but phone does not match — do not attach and the URL is withheld until the mismatch resolves.
Current verification set: 68 listings checked, 34 with website + phone match (URL attached), 18 with a working site but a mismatched phone (URL withheld), and the remainder in other states (site unreachable, redirect chain, timeout). The full verdicts live in data/website-verification.json in the repository.
Verification is expanding: as owners claim their listings the claim itself is a stronger verification signal than a phone match against a state record — so a listing with an owner claim is promoted above the phone-match tier automatically.
Corrections
A correction can arrive three ways:
- Reader report — e-mail to info@wolfpackworksllc.com. Small factual fixes (hours changed, phone number typo, listing has closed) are typically resolved by the next weekly publish.
- Owner claim — the owner claims their listing through /for-business and edits it directly. The state record stays visible in the audit log so a bad-faith edit is reversible.
- State refresh — the next weekly scrape picks up whatever the state has changed. When a listing disappears from the state list entirely, it's marked closed rather than silently deleted, so incoming links don't 404.
What we do not do
- Fabricate listings. Nothing on this site is invented, AI-generated, or scraped from a competitor directory — every row traces to a state or state-partner source or a state-plus-cross-source override entry with the corroboration named in its
sourcefield. - Publish thin pages we can't stand behind. Pages that carry only what the state also carries, with no verification, owner input, or derived comparison, are being moved to
noindex, follow— reachable and linkable, but not asking Google to judge them. Pages earn their way back in as verification lands. - Buy or exchange links. Ever. When we ask a school district, chamber or career-services page to link to us, it is one specific ask about one specific page, we say plainly who we are, and no money changes hands in either direction.
Coverage
LiveScanMap covers 18 states. Coverage expands state by state behind a launch bar (verification pass complete, county pages carrying more than one listing, and a state-specific process guide) — states loaded for testing sit behind noindex until that bar is met.
Who runs this
Wolf Pack Works LLC. General questions to info@wolfpackworksllc.com, business or listing questions to business@wolfpackworksllc.com. Full ownership statement on the about page.