How We Verify Utility Provider Data

Where the data comes from

City and state guides on this site are built from 684,000+ real provider assignments observed across U.S. addresses in our mapping database, not from drawn territory maps. We count who actually showed up for real household lookups, then roll those observations up by ZIP and city, instead of aggregating GIS service-area polygons.

For each city we also sample real, publicly listed civic addresses. Library branches, fire stations, schools. Chosen to spread across the city's neighborhoods and ZIP codes, typically 8–12 per city. We run each address through our utility territory engine, the same system behind the address lookup, which resolves electric, natural gas, water and sewer providers with a calibrated confidence score per answer. Low-confidence results are discarded before any aggregation.

What it takes to name a provider on a city page

• A primary provider must win at least 70% of confident samples. Below that, the page says the answer is split or varies. It never rounds up to a single name.
• A provider that appears only once is shown only when the engine's confidence in that single answer is very high; otherwise it's left out entirely.
• Shares are described in plain language ("most", "about a quarter") because a sample of 8–12 addresses supports direction, not decimal precision. The underlying counts live in our data files.
• Contact details come from the engine's payload only. If the record's phone or website fails our consistency checks, for example, an area code from another state on a local utility, we suppress the contact rather than substitute one from anywhere else.

When we refuse to publish

Some cities you'd expect to find here are missing on purpose. If electric sampling comes back contested. No provider reaching a majority we trust. We withhold the whole page. If a result contradicts what's publicly known about a city and we can't resolve the conflict, the city stays unpublished while it's investigated. And when a whole state's data fails our review, the state ships nothing until the underlying issue is fixed. A missing page here means the honest answer wasn't available yet, not that we forgot.

Freshness

Every city page shows the date its data was last regenerated, and our sitemap reports the same date to search engines. Those dates change only when we actually re-run the sampling. Never as a cosmetic update.

The lookup beats the guide, by design

City-level pages describe the pattern; utility territories are decided address by address. That's why every page, including this one, points you at the address lookup: it queries your exact address against live territory data instead of a city-level summary. If a guide and your lookup result ever disagree, trust the lookup.