Editorial policy

Who writes the guides

PriorMile writes and publishes them - the same people who build the service. The byline on every guide is the company, and the publisher is Infranova Limited, the operator named in the Terms of Service, on every invoice and in the Privacy Policy. It answers for every sentence.

The corporate byline is a decision, not an omission. A named editor with a stated background is worth more than a company name, and that is exactly why we will not manufacture one: a name, a job title and a credential mean something only when they belong to a real person who can be checked, and inventing them would make this the first untrue paragraph on the page. Until there is a person to name, the company carries the responsibility - the same responsibility it already carries for the reports it sells.

Nobody outside the company commissions, reviews or approves a guide. None of them is sponsored, no outbound link is paid for or affiliate-tagged, and the site carries no advertising: what it sells is its own reports, and the guides are written to be right rather than to sell one.

What a guide may cite, and how a source is chosen

The rule is to cite the body that has authority over the fact, and to link to it so that you can check us. In order of preference:

1. Federal law and regulation - the statute or the Code of Federal Regulations text itself, for anything about what is required, permitted or prohibited nationwide.
2. The agency that runs the system being described: NHTSA for safety recalls, the national title database's own guidance for title, brand, junk and salvage reporting, the National Insurance Crime Bureau for theft records.
3. The state that issues the document: a title brand is state law, so what a brand means in one state comes from that state's statute or its motor-vehicle agency's own page. We link to the state rather than generalise across fifty of them.
4. The report itself: where a guide describes what a PriorMile report shows, the source is the report format, and the sample report on this site is the evidence.

What a guide does not cite: other vehicle-history sites, material written to rank rather than to inform, and anything we cannot link to. Where no authoritative source exists for a claim, the claim comes out of the guide rather than going in with a hedge.

Where the report data itself comes from

Corrections

If a guide is wrong, tell us and we will fix it. Write with the guide's title and what is wrong with it; a link or a citation makes it faster, but a plain description of the problem is enough.

Corrections: support@priormile.com

We check the claim against the source it came from. If it is wrong, the text is corrected and the guide's updated date moves with it, so a corrected guide is visibly a corrected guide. If the claim cannot be verified either way, it comes out rather than staying in behind a hedge. If the guide turns out to be right, we write back and say which source says so.

We do not rewrite quietly. A guide's published date never moves, the updated date moves only when the text actually changes, and both dates are printed on the guide and carried in its structured data, so the two can never tell different stories.

When guides are reviewed

Every guide shows the date it was published and, once it has been changed, the date it was last updated. A guide is reviewed:

• When a source it cites changes - a statute is amended, an agency rewrites its guidance, a federal program changes what it reports.
• When a reader reports an error, which puts the whole guide back on the desk rather than only the sentence complained about.
• When what it describes changes: if the content of a PriorMile report or the way it reads changes, every guide that describes it is re-read before that change ships.

There is no fixed review calendar, and we are not going to invent one: a review date on a page nobody actually re-read is worth less than no date at all. What we commit to is that the updated date is honest - it moves when the text changes, and it stays put when nothing has.