How this site is sourced — and where AI is used
A reference site earns trust by being checkable. This page sets out the rules the rest of the site follows: what counts as a source, how figures are dated, how state differences are handled, and the specific, visible way AI-assisted reasoning is separated from cited fact.
USA Info Hub publishes 33 long-form pages and 14 short-answer pages about living in the United States. Every one of them carries a source list, a verification date, and a provenance note. Nothing on the site asks to be taken on faith.
The source hierarchy
A claim is sourced as high up this list as it can be. Where a lower tier is the only available source, the page says so.
- 1
Official
The federal agency or state department that administers the thing being described — the IRS for taxes, SSA for Social Security, USCIS for immigration, CMS for Medicare and Medicaid, a state DMV for licensing, a state housing agency for tenancy.
- 2
Law
The statute or regulation itself, where the precise wording matters — the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Affordable Care Act, the No Surprises Act, or a state landlord-tenant code.
- 3
Regulator
Agencies that decide disputes and publish how they decide them — the CFPB, FTC, EEOC, OSHA, HUD, state insurance commissioners and state attorneys general.
- 4
Statistics
The Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of Economic Analysis, CDC and other official data producers, used for anything numeric about the country.
- 5
Research / news
Universities, peer-reviewed work, KFF, the Congressional Budget Office and established newsrooms — used for context and for dating events, never as the sole authority for a rule, rate or entitlement.
AI-assisted analysis is labeled twice
Once where it appears in the text, and again in the source list. It is never allowed to sit in a paragraph looking like a sourced fact.
AI is used on this site the way a research assistant is used: to read the source material, structure it, draft prose, and cross-check claims against each other. That work is invisible and unremarkable — the same as any editorial tooling.
What is not invisible is the second kind of AI output: a conclusion that no cited document actually contains. “Freeze your credit before you do anything else.” “A CFPB complaint works better than calling again.” “This is the step most people get wrong.” Those are judgments. No agency published them. They are reasoning over the sources, and they are marked as such:
Every page containing such a passage also carries a matching entry in its source list, in a separate block headed “Not a source — AI-assisted analysis on this page”, with no link, because there is nothing to link to. Machine-readable copies of the site (llms.txt and llms-full.txt) carry the same distinction, so a model quoting this site can carry it through rather than flattening our reasoning into an official-sounding fact.
Fifty states, not one country
Getting this wrong is the single most common failure in American how-to content.
Landlord-tenant law, driver licensing, vehicle registration, minimum auto insurance, small claims limits, professional licensing, school enrollment, most criminal law, marriage and divorce, and much of consumer protection are all state law. Several states also add employment protections well beyond the federal floor — paid sick leave, higher minimum wages, and stronger anti-discrimination rules.
Federal and therefore uniform: income tax administration, Social Security, Medicare, immigration, the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act minimum, the Affordable Care Act framework, and federal anti-discrimination law.
Where an answer differs by state, the page says so and points to the state agency. A page that only describes the federal floor will say that too.
Everything is dated
Because in America a great deal of it changes on January 1.
Each page shows the date its facts were last checked against the sources. That date — not the build date — drives the lastmod in the sitemap and the dateModified in the structured data. A deploy that changes no content changes no date. The site-wide review date is currently 2026-07-31.
Federal tax brackets and the standard deduction are inflation-adjusted annually. Most state minimum wages rise on January 1. ACA open enrollment dates and subsidy rules change with legislation. Medicare premiums and deductibles change each year. Treat any figure from a previous year as indicative and confirm it with the agency.
What this site is not
- Not legal, medical, immigration, tax or financial advice. It is general information about publicly documented processes.
- Not a government service. We cannot look up your record, check your case status, or act on your behalf.
- Not a substitute for the agency. Where this site and an official source disagree, the official source wins — and we want to know so we can fix it.
- Not comprehensive on anything discretionary. Immigration decisions, insurance appeals and hardship arrangements turn on individual facts we cannot see.
Questions about how we work
Is USA Info Hub an official government website?
No. It is an independent reference site with no affiliation to, endorsement from, or funding by the United States government or any state government. Where a page describes a government process, it links to the agency page that governs it so you can verify the description at the source.
How do you decide what counts as a source?
In tiers. The administering agency comes first, then the statute or regulation itself, then the regulator that decides disputes, then official statistics, and only then research and news. A rule, rate or entitlement is never sourced to a news article alone.
Where exactly is AI used on this site?
AI is used to draft, structure and cross-check the writing, and to reason over the cited sources. Any conclusion that no cited document actually states — a comparison, a judgment about which option suits whom, an ordering of steps — appears in a dashed, labeled AI-assisted analysis callout and is repeated as an explicit AI-analysis entry in the page's source list.
Does that mean the facts are AI-generated?
No. Facts are taken from the sources listed on each page and are checked against them. The AI labeling exists precisely so that the two things stay visibly separate: what an agency says, and what we concluded from it.
How do you handle differences between states?
Explicitly. Landlord-tenant law, driver licensing, insurance minimums, small claims limits, employment protections beyond the federal floor, school enrollment and much of consumer protection are all state law. Where an answer differs, the page says so rather than describing one state and generalizing.
How current are the figures?
Every page carries the date its facts were last verified, and that same date drives the sitemap and the structured data. US thresholds commonly change on January 1 or with the tax year, ACA open enrollment dates shift, and state minimum wages rise annually — so a figure more than a year old should be confirmed with the responsible agency.