Official page or agency copy: telling them apart

A government publishes a rule. An agency summarises it to attract clients. A blog summarises the agency. An aggregator scrapes the blog. Four steps later a figure that changed in April is still circulating, on pages that look authoritative and rank well, and nobody in the chain is lying — they are simply not going back to check.

This is why a search for almost any visa question returns a first page of near-identical articles agreeing with each other. Agreement between copies is not corroboration. They agree because they share an ancestor.

1. Look at the domain. Government pages sit on government domains — gov.uk, canada.ca, service-public.fr, make-it-in-germany.com. A .com with a company name is not the rule, whatever it says.
2. Look for a date. Official pages carry a last-updated date. Pages that do not are pages nobody has committed to maintaining.
3. Look for the figure's source. A page that states a fee and does not say where it came from is asking to be trusted rather than checked.
4. Search the exact figure. If it appears identically across a dozen sites and on none of the government's, you are reading a copy that has outlived its original.

Every route in this catalogue links to the government page it came from, and every figure carries the date somebody read it there. Where a source is not a government domain, we say so rather than presenting it in the same visual language as one — which is why some of the reach verdicts on this site carry a visible warning.

We maintain a per-country list of domains that count as official, and a page published anywhere else does not become official by being convenient. That list is what decides whether a fact is publishable, and it is the mechanism rather than an intention.

None of which makes us the authority. The government page is the authority. We are a way of finding it, reading it carefully, and telling you when we last looked.