How this record is kept

Checked
Jul 29 2026

The short answer

This atlas publishes a claim about mineral law only after the statute, opinion or agency document behind it has been fetched and read, and every claim carries the date it was last checked against that source. Where the official copy of a text cannot be extracted and an allowlisted full-text mirror was read instead, the page says so and marks it. Nothing here is written from memory and nothing is written by anyone who wants to buy your minerals.

Checked against the sources named below on July 29, 2026.

The sourcing rule

Every fact on this site names a source, and the source has to be one of two things.

• The authority itself. A government host, a state revisor of statutes, an agency's own rule document.
• An allowlisted verbatim mirror. A full-text reproduction of a text whose official copy will not extract, carrying the citation it reproduces.

The second tier exists because mineral rights is statute and case law, and the official copies are frequently unreadable by a machine. During the Colorado pass, three case-law sources refused the request outright and the official statute volumes were published as images inside a PDF. Refusing every non-government host would not have produced a stricter site. It would have produced a site that cannot cite case law at all, and the predictable result of that is prose written from memory, which is far worse than prose quoted from a full-text copy.

So a mirror is allowed, on one condition: it must carry the citation of the authority it reproduces, and the page must disclose that a mirror is what we read. Those disclosures render in gold with a diamond mark. Which copy we read is a feature of the record, not something to hide.

The current mirror allowlist is law.cornell.edu, colorado.public.law, codes.findlaw.com, caselaw.findlaw.com, scholar.law.colorado.edu. Adding one is a deliberate act recorded in the site's source history, not a silent drift.

Who is never a source

Mineral buyers, brokers, and the content farms that serve them are refused outright, by name, in code. There are currently 12 hosts on that list. This is not a judgment about those companies. It is a structural point: a page about what your minerals are worth, published by a company whose business is buying minerals, is a negotiating document. It may even be accurate. It is not the record.

Three states of knowledge

Flattening these three into one confident voice is how a reference site gets something important wrong, so this site keeps them apart on the page as well as in its data.

• Verified. The text was fetched and read. These claims can be quoted verbatim, and they are.
• Partial. The substance is sound but some element, a pin cite or an effective date, was confirmed only indirectly. These render inside a visible caveat that says exactly what is unconfirmed, and they are never quoted.
• Not confirmed. These are not published as claims at all. They appear in the page's list of gaps, in public, so you can see the edge of what has been checked.

Dates, and why the build breaks

Every fact carries the date it was last verified. Each kind of fact has a recheck interval, because a severance tax rate moves annually while a case holding moves when a court acts. Past 200 days the build fails and the page does not publish, rather than quietly serving a claim nobody has looked at in seven months.

That is a deliberately expensive rule. The incumbent this site is measured against runs 99.1 percent of its pages older than a year. Dating and rechecking is not hygiene here, it is the product.

Who writes it

This is an institutional record rather than a personal brand, and it is deliberately not signed by a person. What matters for judging a claim here is the source and the date attached to it, both of which are on the page. Corrections are welcome and are handled the way they should be, on the corrections page.

What this is not

This is not legal advice, and it is not advice about your tract. Mineral title turns on the exact wording of deeds and reservations in your own chain of title. A page here can tell you what your state's statute says and what to look for. Only a title examiner or an attorney reading your instruments can tell you what you own.