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Methodology

How profiles are compiled and checked

This page describes how Axondigi compiles and checks the business profiles published on business.axondigi.com: who compiles them, where the information comes from, how each fact is checked, what part AI plays, and how a profile is corrected.

Last updated October 9, 2026

1. What a profile is and who compiles it

A profile is a public page about one local business. It presents facts such as the business name, address, phone number, website, opening hours, category and description, and it answers questions through an AI assistant that works from the information on that page.

Profiles are compiled by Axondigi Ltd, a registered company based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Questions about this method, or about a specific profile, can be sent to info@axondigi.com.

2. Sources and how we weigh them

Each fact on a profile comes from one of five kinds of source. The kind is stored with the fact, next to the date the fact was last checked.

Owner published
The business's own website and social pages.
Official record
Government registries. They are used for the legal name and the registration status of a business only.
Open data
Open places data such as Overture Maps and Foursquare OS Places. It is used for the address and contact details of a business when the business has not published them itself. It covers every province and territory, was loaded in October 2026, and each fact taken from it carries its source and the date it was last checked.
Owner managed
Information the business enters itself after claiming its profile on Axondigi.
Staff visit
Details that Axondigi staff checked in person at the business.

When sources disagree, the source closest to the business is preferred. What a business manages on Axondigi is preferred over what staff saw on a visit, and both are preferred over open data. The legal name always comes from the official record and cannot be edited by the business.

3. How facts are checked

Sources are compared against each other before a fact is shown. When two sources disagree about the same fact, the rules in section 2 decide which one is used.

Every fact carries the date it was last checked. Sources are re-checked on a schedule and whenever a report comes in. Open places data for every province and territory was loaded in October 2026.

A last-checked date is not a guarantee that nothing has changed since. Hours, phone numbers and other details can change at any time, and reporting a mistake (see section 5) is the fastest way to have it corrected.

4. What AI does and does not do

AI is used to read the cited sources, to extract facts from them, and to draft short summaries that point back to those sources.

AI does not invent phone numbers, addresses or legal names. Those facts come only from the sources described above.

When an automated extraction produced a fact, the fact says so and points to its source, so it can always be told apart from information that came from the business or from an official record.

5. How to correct a profile

A profile can be corrected in three ways.

  • The business can claim its profile and manage it directly. Find your business to start.
  • Anyone can use the Report incorrect information link at the bottom of a profile. Each report is reviewed before anything on the profile changes.
  • AI assistants connected through the MCP endpoint can report incorrect information as well, and those reports go through the same review.

6. AxondigiBot, our website crawler

Who it is
AxondigiBot is the crawler Axondigi Ltd uses to read a business's own website, so that its profile can show the facts the business has published there. It identifies itself in every request with this user agent: AxondigiBot/1.0 (+https://business.axondigi.com/methodology#crawler).
What it reads
About once a month it reads up to four pages of a business's own website, such as its home page and its contact, hours, menu, services or about pages. It reads HTML pages only, one request at a time and at least five seconds apart. It does not run JavaScript, log in or fill in forms, and it does not visit social networks.
What it keeps
Facts such as hours, phone number, address, email and social page links, each stored with its source and the date it was last checked. The text of the pages it read is kept to re-check those facts and to answer questions about the business, and is deleted 90 days after the page was last read. No page text or description is published, and nothing is republished word for word.
What it honours
The site's robots.txt, read at the start of every visit, including Crawl-delay. A page that robots.txt disallows is not read, and a site that disallows its start page is not used at all. A page marked noarchive, in a robots meta tag or an X-Robots-Tag header, has no text kept. A page marked noai, or a site whose robots.txt disallows its start page to any of GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, Claude-User, anthropic-ai, CCBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot, Applebot-Extended, meta-externalagent or Bytespider, is read for facts only: its text is not used to answer questions.
How to opt out, or ask for removal
To stop AxondigiBot, add User-agent: AxondigiBot and, on the next line, Disallow: / to the site's robots.txt. It takes effect at the next visit, when the page text held for the site is deleted at once and the facts taken from it are removed from the profile. To ask for removal without changing robots.txt, use the Report incorrect information link at the bottom of the business's profile, or write to info@axondigi.com.

7. Licences and attribution

Some facts on a profile, mainly addresses and contact details, come from open datasets published by others. We are grateful to the organizations that make them available, and each dataset is used under its own licence.

Humain Machine
Humain Machine