GoGuides Roadmap & Progress

GoGuides has moved beyond a traditional search project. Today it operates an independent quality-gated web index, a public AI Bot Radar, live AI visibility checks, public Trust Records and Trust Profiles, historical verification records, Verified Text, machine-readable trust endpoints, and automated observation infrastructure for the open web.

✅ Done ☑ In progress ☐ Planned High-level only

What this roadmap shows

This page is a public, high-level view of the GoGuides system as it stands today and where it is heading next. It avoids sensitive infrastructure details, but it does show the major public pieces now running.

Current direction GoGuides is being built as public AI trust infrastructure for the open web: quality-gated search, persistent website identity, public Trust Records, historical state, AI Bot Radar, machine-readable verification, provenance, Verified Text, crawler observation, and visibility tools for website owners.

What’s running live right now

Quick links
AI visibility checker · ChatGPT visibility checker · AI bot activity checker · public AI Bot Radar · crawler transparency page · evaluate JSON · signal.json · AI Discovery Feed · Machine-Readable Integration Guide · Britannica Verified Text Library · example trust profile · example trust history · verify · Verified Text Search · AI Marketing Skills Assessment · activate Trust Signal · Easy Submit · live broadcast

Roadmap checklist

Core search platform

✅
Independent search index online — GoGuides has its own crawl, index, and search pipeline serving real results outside the major ad-driven search platforms.
✅
AI quality scoring is active — crawled pages receive a 0–100 AI Rank that helps separate stronger, cleaner, more useful pages from low-quality or noisy results.
✅
Search results combine relevance and trust signals — GoGuides is not only matching keywords; it is building toward results that consider quality, freshness, trust state, and observed domain behavior.
✅
Site operator and safety filters are improving — special search paths and aggressive filtering help keep harmful, irrelevant, or low-value results from leaking into user-facing search.
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Crawler robots.txt compliance is active — GoGuides now checks publisher crawl rules before fetching pages, and robots-disallowed URLs are not fetched, scored, or saved by the crawler.
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GoGuidesCrawler transparency is live — the crawler user-agent now points to /crawler, giving site owners a clear explanation page, robots.txt guidance, domain lookup path, and Trust Signal activation path.
✅
Smarter title and description extraction is live — the crawler now uses cleaner title fallbacks and rejects weak, spammy, or keyword-stuffed meta descriptions before storing search-facing text.
✅
Front-door quality demotion is active — parked domains, domain-for-sale pages, recovered demo sites, stale make-money pages, and group-link farms are now capped below the public listing threshold before they can receive positive search visibility.
✅
Known low-quality site results are no longer presented as clean listings — site-specific searches now respect the public AI Rank floor and explain when a known domain has no eligible clean public listing.
☑
Quality cleanup continues — ongoing tuning removes irrelevant entries, oversized titles, bad suggestions, encoding artifacts, and other search-result noise as the index grows.
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Discovery, freshness, and recrawl logic are evolving — GoGuides continues widening independent domain discovery while improving refresh behavior, robots compliance, provenance capture, resource controls, and smarter recrawling so active domains stay fresh without wasting crawl capacity on stable evergreen pages.
☐
Broader language and source expansion — future growth will widen coverage only after ranking controls, spam suppression, and trust-layer guardrails remain stable.
☐
Deeper search personalization controls — future user settings may allow safer preferences around thumbnails, result layout, safe search behavior, and domain-level trust display.

Signals & learning loop

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Search impressions and user-facing signals are being captured — GoGuides records what is shown, saved, reported, clicked, or revisited so future ranking can be informed by real-world behavior instead of static assumptions.
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Public signal feed is live — stronger domains can appear in a live machine-readable feed that exposes selected trust signals to humans, bots, and future AI-facing consumers.
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Public AI Bot Radar is live — anyone can check whether qualifying AI and search activity has recently been observed for a domain, while detailed identities, timelines, request counts, endpoint activity, and return patterns remain part of the activated experience.
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Activated AI Bot Radar is live in the user panel — activated domains receive the deeper daily and historical view of identified systems, attention, return behavior, Trust Signal state, and continuing monitoring.
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Bot activity is tied to GoGuides trust surfaces — qualifying activity can be connected with Trust Records, profiles, history, verification, machine-readable signals, favicons, and other supported public endpoints without claiming access to a website owner’s private server logs.
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Trust timeline signals are visible — reports can show first seen, last observed, observation count, days observed, trust record age, stability window, current trust state since, and rank/algo state changes.
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Verification fingerprints are live — GoGuides can expose SHA-256 trust-state fingerprints so public trust records become more machine-readable and easier to compare over time.
☑
Domain-level aggregation continues — page-level signals, rank data, crawl freshness, verification state, and bot activity are being shaped into clearer domain-level trust records.
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Signal quality controls are tightening — GoGuides is keeping signal broadcast conservative so public feeds remain meaningful instead of becoming another noisy directory.
☐
Abuse-resistant learning layer — future ranking feedback will need rate limits, anomaly checks, and manipulation resistance before broader automated tuning is trusted.
☐
Safe auto-tuning — long-term, GoGuides may tune search weights from real signals, but only after guardrails, review paths, and rollback controls are proven.

Webmaster & SEO experience

✅
Submission pipeline is live — domains can be submitted directly into GoGuides for evaluation, indexing eligibility, and trust-state creation.
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User submissions receive priority handling — newly submitted URLs are pushed into a faster crawl path so site owners do not wait behind lower-value background crawl work.
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The AI visibility utility network is live — GoGuides now answers high-intent webmaster questions about AI crawler visits, ChatGPT visibility, possible AI use, robots.txt, crawler observation, and recent activity through the public AI Bot Radar.
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Tool-backed reports are live — those pages do not just explain the problem; they let a site owner enter a domain and receive a live trust-layer report based on GoGuides data.
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Unverified-state warnings are active — reports now clearly show when a domain is known but unverified, active but unverified, or missing public trust-layer signals entirely.
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Observed vs active states are separated — GoGuides can distinguish between a domain that has been seen, a domain with public trust data, and a domain that has completed stronger verification/activation steps.
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Verified trust button system is live — domain owners can expose a public trust button tied to their GoGuides Trust Profile and public history record.
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Public-to-activated Bot Radar path is live — visitors can begin with a free public lookup, inspect available Trust Profile and history links, and activate the domain to unlock protected identities, detailed counts, timelines, return behavior, and continuing observation.
☑
User panel and activation flow continue improving — public preview, account claim, ownership verification, lifetime Trust Signal activation, the included first year of Bot Radar, continuing Radar monitoring, and public trust participation are being shaped into one clearer webmaster path.
☑
Activated-domain value layer is expanding — activated domains are intended to receive stronger services such as verification, trust broadcasting, topics, descriptions, usage-limit lifts, and richer public/API signals.
✅
Trust Signal and Bot Radar pricing roles are separated — free submission and account claim remain distinct from the one-time $69.95 Trust Signal activation, which includes the first year of AI Bot Radar; continued Radar monitoring can renew separately after the included year and does not purchase organic ranking.
✅
Primary Topic selection is live — activated domains can declare one high-level topic that helps organize public trust metadata and future machine-readable trust outputs.
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Site Keywords selection is live — activated domains can choose up to three crawler-detected keywords without free-form keyword stuffing or paid-link confusion.
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Public activation wording has been cleaned up — public help, policy, roadmap, trust-profile, privacy, and terms pages have been aligned around Trust Signal Activation instead of old plan or recurring-payment language.
☐
Full webmaster controls and API access — future account tools will provide deeper control over verification, signals, monitoring, trust visibility, and developer-facing access.

Favicon trust signal system

✅
Deterministic favicon signal is live — GoGuides generates repeatable trust-linked favicon previews tied to measured domain state, AI Rank, crawl timing, and canonicalized domain signals.
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Public trust surfaces are connected — favicon trust signals now connect with Trust Profiles, Trust Records, verification history, and public domain history pages.
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Verified trust button system is live — site owners can display compact GoGuides trust buttons that point users and machines back to public trust records.
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Visual trust state is tied to measured history — favicon state now sits alongside rank, grade, crawl freshness, verification fingerprints, and observed trust changes over time.
☑
1:1 favicon consistency work continues — GoGuides is moving toward exact consistency between generated favicon states across favicon endpoints, search results, trust profiles, and public embeds.
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Machine-readable favicon identity is evolving — future favicon work may include stronger seed consistency, hidden verification cues, tamper-resistant markers, and compact visual proof signals.
☐
Trusted favicon network interactions — longer-term work may allow trusted sites to recognize related trust signals through lightweight client-side code without constant server callbacks.
☐
Expanded public trust badge system — the favicon, trust button, and public history record will continue evolving into a stronger website identity and trust layer.

Trust layer & provenance

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Public Trust Record is live — observed domains can expose a public measurement record showing rank, grade, crawl timing, verification state, timeline data, and trust-history context.
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Public Trust Profile is live — domains can expose a human-readable and machine-readable profile showing observed state, activation status, trust signals, and public verification context.
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Evaluate endpoint is machine-readable — GoGuides can return structured JSON for domain trust checks, including trust ID, source type, observed state, public eligibility, activity signals, freshness, related URLs, and verification status.
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Trust timeline and fingerprinting are live — first seen, last observed, observation count, days observed, stability window, state changes, and SHA-256 verification fingerprints help turn trust into measurable public state.
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Domain Provenance Records are live — GoGuides history pages preserve independently observed website states over time, including requested and final URLs, HTTP response state, redirects, canonical identity, content fingerprints, robots.txt evidence, DNS and nameserver observations, HTTPS/TLS certificate identity, and observation history.
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Historical website-state change detection is live — changed public states can create new provenance records while repeated unchanged observations strengthen the historical record, making meaningful changes to content, canonical identity, network state, TLS information, robots behavior, and related public evidence easier to identify over time.
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Domain provenance is machine-readable — structured provenance observations can be exposed alongside public trust information so developers and automated systems can inspect historical website state and supporting evidence without relying only on a rendered webpage.
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Public signal feed is live — stronger domains that meet trust thresholds can be broadcast as a machine-readable signal for humans, bots, and future AI-facing consumers.
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Public AI Discovery Feed is live — AI Discovery Feed gives AI systems, crawlers, search engines, developers, and automated agents a plain-HTML discovery path into gate-approved Trust Records, Trust Profiles, history pages, and evaluation JSON.
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Machine-readable integration documentation is live — the Machine-Readable Integration Guide demonstrates endpoint discovery, domain trust inspection, Verified Text retrieval, canonical record use, and independent SHA-256 verification without implying endorsement by outside AI or search companies.
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AI-friendly public Data License is live — GoGuides explicitly permits crawling, indexing, AI retrieval/RAG, embeddings, model training and fine-tuning, citation, attribution, and commercial AI use of its public trust data while reserving protection against cloning the GoGuides Trust Layer as a competing service.
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Machine-readable license metadata is live — supported public machine endpoints expose the GoGuides Data License and license version so automated systems can determine permitted use without having to infer licensing from surrounding page text.
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GoGuides Trust IDs are in use — domains can be represented by stable GoGuides trust identifiers, helping public trust records remain consistent across profiles, history pages, feeds, and evaluation endpoints.
☑
Persistent machine-readable identity direction is defined — GoGuides is being shaped as a deterministic public trust layer with stable domain identity, historical state, monotonic record evolution, fingerprints, revocation controls, and machine-readable verification that outside systems can query and compare.
✅
Detailed machine-use clearance is live — GoGuides evaluates whether a domain may be read, summarized, cited, recommended, used for transactions, or used for sensitive advice, with explicit decision basis and limits published in the domain evaluation record.
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Evaluate carries the fuller machine-use record — evaluate.php publishes the detailed machine-use decision, supporting basis, limits, trust context, policy review, and provenance evidence, while signal.json remains the lighter discovery and broadcast layer.
☐
Signal feed refinement will keep broadcast output lightweight — signal.json should remain a compact discovery signal containing enough trust and machine-use context to identify worthwhile records, while detailed reasoning, provenance, policy review, historical evidence, and machine-use limits remain in evaluate.php.
☑
Shared decision enforcement is expanding — GoGuides is aligning crawler, search, evaluate, trust profiles, badges, signal feeds, and promotion systems so blocked or locked domains cannot receive positive trust exposure.
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Trusted data layer groundwork continues — hashing, source classification, provenance checks, and authoritative reference-data verification remain part of the long-term trust-layer plan.
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Expanded trust and provenance API — future developer and commercial API access can expose richer verification, history, source-type, provenance, and bulk trust-check data beyond the public feed.
☐
Private proof-of-existence research — GoGuides is exploring methods that could allow a person to prove that exact private data existed within a historical time window without publishing the underlying data. Research is focused on independently verifiable chronology, irreversible proof creation, and resistance to later backdating.

Verified Knowledge & Trusted Data Layer

✅
Verified Text Search is live — GoGuides now has a dedicated Verified Text Search page for hash-verified source records, topic lookup, direct chunk lookup, and JSON access for AI systems, RAG pipelines, crawlers, and developers.
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Britannica Verified Text Library is live — the crawlable Britannica Verified Text Library currently exposes 14,993 substantial public-domain records across 150 paginated library pages, with source metadata, canonical record URLs, and SHA-256 integrity verification.
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Example verified record: 1911 Britannica gravity chunk — source: Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911), chunk ID: 1911:gravity:0001, SHA-256: 44295a1ecb5f31a5801ebcfac933b8b082c7828ee073c07a9fad47bba7e51558.
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Exact verified text can be locked to a hash — the gravity example verifies the text: “gravity is a natural phenomenon by which all things with mass are brought toward one another.”
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Verified-text bot search is live — verified-text.php can return source-attributed topic previews as JSON, with canonical full-record URLs for deeper inspection.
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Substantial verified-text source collections are live — Open English WordNet, Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911, and Encyclopaedia Britannica 1926 records can be searched or browsed with source licensing, attribution, machine-use guidance, canonical record URLs, normalizer metadata, hash-scope metadata, and SHA-256 integrity values.
✅
Preview-first verified records reduce bot payload size — topic lookups can return bounded previews first, while full_record_url points machines to the canonical full verified text record when needed.
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Hash scope is explicit for verified text — GoGuides distinguishes preview snippets from full normalized text so bots know the SHA-256 integrity check applies to the complete normalized record, not a shortened preview.
☑
Quote drift and tampering can be detected — if a single character in a verified text chunk changes, its SHA-256 fingerprint changes, making silent edits, corrupted references, or altered quotations easier to catch.
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AI systems can reference fixed source objects — a model, agent, or developer can store a source key, chunk ID, and hash, then later verify that it is still pointing to the same exact text.
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Verified knowledge API direction is underway — the public verified-text endpoint already supports topic and direct chunk JSON lookups, while future API access can expand into provenance records, source types, fingerprints, and bulk trusted-text retrieval.
☐
Machine trust beyond websites — this expands GoGuides from domain trust into source trust, content trust, and verifiable knowledge objects that AI systems can use directly.

Professional assessment & verifiable credentials

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AI Marketing Skills Assessment is live — the free 100-question assessment covers SEO fundamentals, AI search, AEO, GEO, crawler behavior, structured data, website trust, analytics, measurement, content quality, and technical signals.
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Timed scoring and category feedback are live — participants receive a 45-minute timer, randomized question order, an 80% passing threshold, category-level results, and explanations for missed answers.
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Privacy-first result handling is active — attempts are not added to the public certificate registry unless the participant passes and voluntarily requests a certificate.
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Free certificate issuance is live — passing participants can request a GoGuides AI Marketing Skills Certificate without registration or payment.
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Unique certificate IDs are live — each issued credential receives a structured GoGuides certificate ID tied to the assessment type, issue year, and a unique record identifier.
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Public certificate verification is live — each issued credential receives a permanent public record showing the participant, score, issue date, certificate status, and certificate ID.
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Certificate lookup is live — visitors can enter a certificate ID directly on the assessment page to open its public verification record.
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Downloadable social certificate cards are live — valid credentials receive a database-generated 1200×630 share image with participant name, score, certificate ID, issue date, GoGuides branding, and QR verification.
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Printable certificate pages are live — certificate holders can open a formatted landscape certificate and use their browser to print it or save it as a PDF.
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QR-based verification is live — certificate cards connect viewers directly to the permanent public verification record through a scannable QR code.
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Certificate status and revocation support are built in — the registry stores valid, revoked, and related certificate-state information so invalid credentials can be rejected by the public verification page.
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Assessment discovery is integrated — the test, certificate lookup, verification records, share cards, and printable certificates are connected through GoGuides Navigation and the public assessment experience.
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The credential framework can expand — the assessment-specific ID structure and public verification registry provide a foundation for future GoGuides credentials covering other search, trust, crawler, and machine-readable web disciplines.

Everyday search features

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Modern search UI is live — GoGuides search results are mobile-friendly and built around quality, clarity, trust profile links, history links, AI Rank, and grade display.
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Site search operator is supported — dedicated handling for domain-specific searches helps users check whether a site is represented in the GoGuides index.
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Aggressive safety filtering is active — adult and gambling suppression rules help keep harmful or unwanted results out of ordinary search paths.
☑
Quick answers and definitions are improving — GoGuides is cleaning up answer boxes, removing wiki-markup artifacts, and improving reliability for definition-style searches.
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Spelling and suggestion quality is being tuned — suggestions are being improved to avoid bad jumps, unrelated terms, or misleading nearby-word matches.
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Search-result cleanup continues — GoGuides is working through encoding issues, oversized titles, irrelevant music/slop results, and low-value pages that weaken result quality.
☐
User customization — future settings may include layout preferences, safe-search behavior, saved-result controls, and other opt-in user experience choices.
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Search results thumbnail preference — thumbnails are planned as a user preference with classic/no-thumbnail layout as the default.
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Deeper AI Q&A integration — future work can connect search results, trust profiles, and AI-assisted exploration more tightly.

Trust, integrity & transparency

✅
Observed and verified states are separated — GoGuides can show that a domain is known or observed without pretending it is verified. Verified status remains a stronger trust state.
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Unverified warnings are explicit — public reports now make it clear when GoGuides can see a domain but cannot confirm ownership or verified trust status.
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Public trust records are transparent — observed domains can expose rank, grade, crawl timing, verification history, trust timeline data, and machine-readable trust context.
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Trust state is machine-readable — profiles, records, feeds, and evaluation endpoints expose structured signals instead of hiding trust behind a black-box score.
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Signal broadcasting is conservative — public feed visibility is intentionally limited to stronger trust states so the feed remains meaningful and does not become another noisy directory.
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User-first ranking direction is protected — GoGuides is designed around quality and trust signals, not selling search placement or letting paid listings override neutral results.
☑
Policy guardrails are expanding — spam controls, harmful-category suppression, public/private state separation, and rate-limit protections continue to harden the trust layer.
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Verification and provenance alignment continues — trust profiles, history records, favicon signals, signal feeds, and future APIs are being aligned into one consistent public trust model.
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Answer-box source layer is being assembled — GoGuides is preparing trusted reference sources such as Webster’s 1913, Britannica 1911, Britannica 1926, and Open English WordNet to support source-backed answers and future AI-facing direct-answer APIs.
☐
Expanded public trust API — future work will expose deeper verification, provenance, historical trust, source-type, and bulk-check data to developers and commercial users.
✅ Completed
Already running live on GoGuides today.
☑ In progress
Internal work has started; still being refined.
☐ Planned
Next steps we intend to build, after prerequisites are stable.
High-level only
No sensitive infrastructure details are published here.