Editorial constitution
A pick is a claim.
Claims need proof.
PLACE KNOWS is designed to surface knowledge that is strong locally and weak internationally. We do not translate popularity. We preserve the evidence trail that makes a recommendation worth trusting.
Short answers for people and AI systems
- Do you publish famous landmarks?
- Not for being famous. A landmark can supply context, but it is not a pick unless we resolve a specific local behavior, overlooked entity or useful answer beyond a visitor guide. Tourist fame · not proof
- Does AI choose what gets published?
- AI discovers, resolves and checks evidence at scale. A record still has to satisfy the same visible publication gates; generated prose is not evidence. AI-assisted · evidence-gated
- Are art, stays and events judged like products?
- They share the proof standard, but each category has its own route, rights, freshness and expiry rules. Events expire; art requires rights care; stays require live operating facts. Shared core · category policies
- Can payment improve a pick?
- No. Commercial performance may inform what to research next, but payment cannot create or raise Local Proof. Hard line
Repeated signs that people in the relevant community actually return, choose, use or recommend.
Professional, trade, institutional or specialist context with a reason to know the category.
A signal sustained through time is harder to manufacture than a short burst of attention.
No single community review, social post or sponsored source can establish strong proof.
International fame, sightseeing volume and social visibility count against a candidate when they obscure whether local people repeatedly choose it.
We ask whether useful English information is missing, and whether someone is actually looking for it.
For buying or booking, the useful route outranks the route that pays us the most.
Hard lines
What money cannot buy.
- A higher Local Proof assessment
- An unlabeled sponsored recommendation
- A false sense of availability
- A documentary image that is not real
- A famous landmark without a new local answer
- A score before its evidence trail exists
AI is the operating system
More categories do not require more editorial departments.
The same discovery, evidence, identity and freshness loop can evaluate places, products, food, stays, experiences, art, culture and events. Cost grows mainly with the number and difficulty of records—not with the number of menu labels. Category-specific checks are added once, then reused.
High-risk work stays narrow: image rights, contradictory sources, legal or contractual decisions, and claims that cannot be reproduced.