How American Commerce Review verifies US company, industrial investment, state, policy and economic research.
Scope. This page explains how American Commerce Review handles permanent research, datasets, rankings and evidence-heavy reporting. It complements the publication's
Editorial Standards, which govern corrections, independence, bylines and assisted production.
American Commerce Review covers the US business environment from company decisions outward. The publication therefore distinguishes corporate investment announcements from money already spent, federal awards from private capital commitments and state incentives from total project value.
The preferred evidence base is federal and state government documentation, SEC and company filings, official economic data and company releases. Large project totals are kept attached to the site, state, period and stage in which they were disclosed.
Primary-source hierarchy
Sources are chosen according to the subject and the claim being made. The following source types normally receive priority, with the most specific underlying document preferred over a general summary.
- SEC filings, company investor-relations material and company project announcements
- US Department of Commerce, Department of Labor, Treasury, Federal Reserve, BEA and BLS releases
- State economic-development agencies, public incentive agreements and local planning records
- Official company-location and employment disclosures
- High-quality secondary reporting used to supplement, not replace, accessible primary evidence
Core research rules
Industrial investment
Announced programme value, committed capital, construction spending, federal awards and state incentives are separate fields. They are not added together unless the source establishes that the figures are non-overlapping components of the same total.
Project stage
Announced, awarded, permitted, under construction, commissioned and operating are different stages. A groundbreaking does not establish production. A federal award does not establish that the full private investment programme has been spent.
States and business geography
Headquarters, incorporation, manufacturing location and major employment presence are different concepts. State rankings specify which one is being measured. Multi-state programmes are not allocated to one state without site-level evidence.
Employment and company size
US employment is preferred over global workforce when the subject is state or national employment. Estimated workforce figures are labelled. Fortune, market-cap and revenue rankings keep their own eligibility rules rather than being blended into one definition of company size.
Dataset and permanent-reference rules
US Industrial Investment Tracker
Each row represents an identifiable US facility or site-level programme supported by company or government documentation. Private investment and public incentives remain separate, and the stage column is reviewed independently from the capital figure.
State guides and rankings
State comparisons preserve the year and source of the underlying statistic. A company operating in a state is not automatically counted as headquartered there, and metropolitan data is not substituted for statewide data.
Review dates, corrections and refreshes
Reference pages are reviewed when project stage, investment commitments, official statistics or company disclosures materially change. Older announcements remain dated to their original context. Corrections identify the affected figure or classification rather than silently rewriting the historical record.
Where a material factual error is identified, the correction process follows the Editorial Standards. Research pages are not given a newer date simply to create an appearance of freshness.
Network-wide quality gate
A publication-wide quality gate for research, rankings, explainers and evidence-led reporting. New pages should add verifiable information, structure or analysis that a reader could not obtain by merely restating the same source material.
Add a new fact, comparison or structure
Every authority page should contribute at least one material element beyond a generic summary: an original dataset, a ranked or normalised comparison, a historical series, a project-stage classification, a source reconciliation, a geographic breakdown, or a clearly reasoned synthesis across multiple sources.
Prefer primary evidence
Company filings, regulators, government datasets, official project disclosures, investor materials and other first-party records should establish factual claims wherever practical. Secondary reporting can add context, challenge claims or fill gaps, but should not replace an available primary source without a reason.
Preserve provenance
Numbers must retain their observation date, source and qualification. Announced investment is not treated as completed spending, planned capacity is not operating capacity, and group-wide figures are not silently assigned to one site, country or subsidiary.
Make definitions explicit
Rankings, trackers and databases must explain what is included, what is excluded and how ambiguous categories are handled. Terms such as largest, capacity, investment, employer, headquarters, analyst consensus and project stage should be operationally defined.
Show uncertainty instead of inventing precision
Missing values remain missing unless a defensible calculation is explicitly labelled. Estimates, ranges and inferred values must be distinguished from disclosed figures. Conflicting sources should be surfaced rather than averaged into false certainty.
Keep a time dimension
Materially changing subjects should retain review dates, historical observations or event histories so readers and machines can distinguish a current state from a previous disclosure.
Connect the evidence graph
High-value pages should link to the relevant authority hub, supporting analysis, persistent entities, methodology and primary-source evidence. New pages should strengthen an existing topic graph rather than exist as isolated search landings.
Do not publish thin variants
A new page should not exist solely because a keyword has a slightly different wording. Overlapping intent should be consolidated into the strongest canonical resource unless the new page has a genuinely different dataset, audience task, geography, time frame or analytical question.
Publication gate before a new authority URL is created
- What verifiable information or structure does this page add that is not already present elsewhere in the archive?
- Can the important quantitative claims be traced to a source and observation date?
- Are scope, definitions and exclusions clear enough for another analyst to reproduce the classification?
- Does the page distinguish disclosed facts from estimates, interpretation and commentary?
- Does the page belong to an existing authority cluster and link back into that cluster?
- Would merging this material into an existing canonical page produce a better resource than publishing a separate URL?
Default decision: if a proposed page cannot clear these questions, the preferred action is to strengthen, update or consolidate an existing canonical resource instead of publishing another thin URL.